If you want to get crazy you can poll() on one of the evdev nodes (/dev/input/event*) and behave accordingly. I do this in a C application we use to do the exact same thing you're talking about.
Each successful read from the device returns a 16-byte input_event struct (or similar, I'm going from memory here) that represents a key action. A google search returned this: http://svn.navi.cx/misc/trunk/python/evdev/evdev.py On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 12:22 +0200, Mathias Dahl wrote: > I am creating a small app called PyQe > (http://klibb.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/PyQe) to launch commands and > programs quickly. I works more or less as I want it now and I have > managed to make my window manager (Metacity) under Mandrake GNU/Linux > start my program so that it can be started easily with just a > keypress. > > Now, the only annoyance I have is that when I have not started the > program for a while, the OS seems to not have Python or the program in > "the cache" (or whatever, what I mean is that if I have started the > program "recently" it starts fast the next time) anymore, which means > that the program, even though quite small, takes about a second to > start. This is too slow to feel good given the nature of the program > (a quick launcher). > > I have tried making it start faster by calling python with the -S > switch and by compiling my program to a .pyc file. It has not helped > much. > > So, I was wondering if I could have my program running in the > background and instead capture a certain keystroke (the same one I > have my window manager to capture now) to make the GUI appear. > > How does one go about doing this? I found a small program written in C > (xbindkeys) that can do this and understand that it probably involves > a lot of "low-level" stuff in X which feels a bit "scary" :). Any > clues of doing this "easily" in Python + some module? > > /Mathias > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
