keylistener – Key Listeners in python?

keylistener – Key Listeners in python?

I was searching for a simple solution without window focus. Jayks answer, pynput, works perfect for me. Here is the example how I use it.

from pynput import keyboard

def on_press(key):
    if key == keyboard.Key.esc:
        return False  # stop listener
    try:
        k = key.char  # single-char keys
    except:
        k = key.name  # other keys
    if k in [1, 2, left, right]:  # keys of interest
        # self.keys.append(k)  # store it in global-like variable
        print(Key pressed:  + k)
        return False  # stop listener; remove this if want more keys

listener = keyboard.Listener(on_press=on_press)
listener.start()  # start to listen on a separate thread
listener.join()  # remove if main thread is polling self.keys

Its unfortunately not so easy to do that. If youre trying to make some sort of text user interface, you may want to look into curses. If you want to display things like you normally would in a terminal, but want input like that, then youll have to work with termios, which unfortunately appears to be poorly documented in Python. Neither of these options are that simple, though, unfortunately. Additionally, they do not work under Windows; if you need them to work under Windows, youll have to use PDCurses as a replacement for curses or pywin32 rather than termios.

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I was able to get this working decently. It prints out the hexadecimal representation of keys you type. As I said in the comments of your question, arrows are tricky; I think youll agree.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import termios
import contextlib


@contextlib.contextmanager
def raw_mode(file):
    old_attrs = termios.tcgetattr(file.fileno())
    new_attrs = old_attrs[:]
    new_attrs[3] = new_attrs[3] & ~(termios.ECHO | termios.ICANON)
    try:
        termios.tcsetattr(file.fileno(), termios.TCSADRAIN, new_attrs)
        yield
    finally:
        termios.tcsetattr(file.fileno(), termios.TCSADRAIN, old_attrs)


def main():
    print exit with ^C or ^D
    with raw_mode(sys.stdin):
        try:
            while True:
                ch = sys.stdin.read(1)
                if not ch or ch == chr(4):
                    break
                print %02x % ord(ch),
        except (KeyboardInterrupt, EOFError):
            pass


if __name__ == __main__:
    main()

keylistener – Key Listeners in python?

There is a way to do key listeners in python. This functionality is available through pynput.

Command line:

$ pip install pynput

Python code:

from pynput import keyboard
# your code here