Invoking GUI for app running in background with a keypress

[Mathias Dahl]

Jeremy Moles <jeremy at emperorlinux.com> writes:

> 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

Thanks for the pointer. That sounds crazy indeed! Maybe a bit too
crazy (low-level) for me... :)

I tested the code very briefly:

 $ python evdev.py /dev/input/event0
 
 Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "evdev.py", line 549, in ?
     demo()
   File "evdev.py", line 35, in demo
     dev = Device(sys.argv[1])
   File "evdev.py", line 91, in __init__
     self.fd = os.open(filename, os.O_RDWR | os.O_NONBLOCK)
 OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/dev/input/event0'

Loggin in (su:ing) as root solves that problem but I'm not sure I want
to require the user being root to be able to run my program.

Anyway, thanks again for the hint!

/Mathias