msvcrt.getch() overly receptive in idle?

[Frank Miles]

In article <u4rtl46mf.fsf at ctwd0143.fitlinxx.com>,
David Bolen  <db3l at fitlinxx.com> wrote:
>fpm at u.washington.edu (Frank Miles) writes:
>
>> I'm trying to get getch() working in Windows (Python 2.0).  It seems to
>> work fine outside of Idle, but inside Idle it immediately returns a
>> character with the value 255.
>> 
>> Can anyone point me to the obvious solution?  Thanks!
>
>I expect that getch() requires a working "console" window, and when
>you run Idle you don't get one as its set to use pythonw.exe.  Thus,
>it's technically not able to process any keystrokes and returns
>immediately.
>
>You could try to verify that by starting Idle from the command line
>with the standard python.  (But you may have to be in that console
>window to trigger the getch() to return).
>
>A GUI doesn't really have individual keystrokes sent as console
>characters, but instead receives events upon keypresses.  So a getch()
>call in a GUI application is sort of non-sensical (within the GUI
>framework).
>
>To do the equivalent in a GUI, you'd need to wait for a keypress
>event.  I'm not sure how easy or not it would be to tie into Idle's
>event loop to notice such a thing.

Thanks.  This makes sense.  This indirect approach will hopefully
provide a way to debug apps that need this kind of functionality.

	-frank
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