Capture all keypresses of the system with Tkinter

Question

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.

Functional

You may are intrested in this. Its a builtin solution for ms windows. While I like the external libary pywin32. – Questionary

Answer 1

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

Bakunin

It's not possible without external library. – Bakunin

Take a look here: github.com/boppreh/keyboard – Bakunin

Note: keyboard sadly has some drawbacks compared to other libraries such as pynput.keybaord, for me some fast keystrokes were not caught by the former, but they were by the latter. – Functional

Answer 2

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)

Bimonthly

Thanks but it seems that this only catch keystrokes if the Tkinter window has the focus (I'm looking for a solution for all keystrokes even if the window doesn't have the focus, see my question) – Functional

Ah saw the edit. As mentioned in #57285592, you can put the app logic in one thread, and the key detection in another or you can use systemhotkey package – Bimonthly