Question

Is there anyway to use pygame to get input from the console, rather than having to display a separate window to get input? I’m using pygame to track how long the keys on the keyboard are pressed.

The following code doesn’t work (this is just a minimal example, it doesn’t actually keep track of time elapsed):

pygame.init()

while 1:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
            print event.key, 'pressed'

It doesn’t look like any pygame event is being raised. If I add

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((640, 480))

After

pygame.init()

then the event is raised, but I have that ghastly window I don’t want to deal with.

To explain why I don’t want the window, I envision this application being a command-line utility, so I can’t have that. Is there any functional reason preventing pygame from running on the command-line?

Thanks!

EDIT: I speculated that the problem was pygame.init(), and that I only needed to initialize the key and event modules. According to http://www.pygame.org/docs/tut/ImportInit.html I should have been able to call

pygame.key.init()
pygame.event.init()

but it didn’t work.

Answer 1

Pygame is designed for making (graphical) games, so it only captures key presses when there is a window displayed. As Ignacio said in his answer, reading from the command line and from another window are very different things.

If you want to create a command line application, try curses:

http://docs.python.org/library/curses.html

Unfortunately, it only works on Linux and Mac OS X.