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Basj
Basj

Reputation: 46493

Capture all keypresses of the system with Tkinter

I'm coding a little tool that displays the key presses on the screen with Tkinter, useful for screen recording.

Is there a way to get a listener for all key presses of the system globally with Tkinter? (for every keystroke including F1, CTRL, ..., even when the Tkinter window does not have the focus)

I currently know a solution with pyHook.HookManager(), pythoncom.PumpMessages(), and also solutions from Listen for a shortcut (like WIN+A) even if the Python script does not have the focus but is there a 100% tkinter solution?

Indeed, pyhook is only for Python 2, and pyhook3 seems to be abandoned, so I would prefer a built-in Python3 / Tkinter solution for Windows.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1771

Answers (2)

Corralien
Corralien

Reputation: 120409

Solution 1: if you need to catch keyboard events in your current window, you can use:

from tkinter import *
 
def key_press(event):
    key = event.char
    print(f"'{key}' is pressed")
 
root = Tk()
root.geometry('640x480')
root.bind('<Key>', key_press)
mainloop()

Solution 2: if you want to capture keys regardless of which window has focus, you can use keyboard

Upvotes: 4

CarlosSR
CarlosSR

Reputation: 1195

As suggested in tkinter using two keys at the same time, you can detect all key pressed at the same time with the following:


history = []
def keyup(e):
    print(e.keycode)
    if  e.keycode in history :
        history.pop(history.index(e.keycode))

        var.set(str(history))

def keydown(e):
    if not e.keycode in history :
        history.append(e.keycode)
        var.set(str(history))

root = Tk()
root.bind("<KeyPress>", keydown)
root.bind("<KeyRelease>", keyup)

Upvotes: 0

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