Python get keyboard input without getting stuck

Question

I'm making a python program that changes my wallpaper every hour, but i want to be able to also change the wallpaper when i press a certain button.

this is the code i've tried

while True:
    key = ord(getch())

but the only bad part is that it gets stuck on that until i press something. Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

You may be able to achieve what you want by using https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pynput.

See also its docs on pythonhosted http://pythonhosted.org/pynput/, especially the section about monitoring the keyboard http://pythonhosted.org/pynput/keyboard.html#monitoring-the-keyboard.

The following is an example from the docs:

from pynput.keyboard import Key
from pynput.keyboard import Listener


def on_press(key):
    print('{0} pressed'.format(
        key))

def on_release(key):
    print('{0} release'.format(
        key))
    if key == Key.esc:
        # Stop listener
        return False

# Collect events until released
with Listener(
        on_press=on_press,
        on_release=on_release) as listener:
    listener.join()

It will print every key you press until you press ESC, after which it will terminate.

Note that there are some operating system specific things to consider, for example on OSX the process must run as root.