PythonWin, python thread and PostQuitMessage?

[aloonstra at gmail.com]

On 12 mrt, 18:43, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
> En Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:21:35 -0200, <arn... at sphaero.org> escribió:
>
> > I'm not so much involved in any Windows programming however I needed
> > to write a client for the Windows platform. I have this very simple
> > question which I've been unable to answer. I'm listening for keyboard
> > strokes using the pyhook library. I'm doing this in a dedicated
> > thread. The gui just controls the thread. When I want to pause
> > listening for keyboard strokes I wanted to do a PostQuitMessage() to
> > the thread. However this does not work since it either kills the whole
> > app or just does not happen in the thread it's supposed to. I've now
> > made an ugly workaround using PumpWaitingMessages and a delay.
>
> If you have a GUI, then very likely it has its own message loop, so you  
> should not create another.
>
>
>
> > def run(self):
> >    print "Wkeylog run called"
> >    # Hook Keyboard
> >    self.hm.HookKeyboard()
> >    while self.log:
> >            win32gui.PumpWaitingMessages()
> >            time.sleep(0.02)
>
> > i can now just cancel the process by setting self.log to False. I
> > wanted to do just:
>
> > def run(self):
> >    print "Wkeylog run called"
> >    # Hook Keyboard
> >    self.hm.HookKeyboard()
> >    win32gui.PumpMessages()
>
> Then, if you remove PumpMesages and PumpWaitingMessages, there is nothing  
> left... so this thread is useless.
> Perhaps you want to *process* keyboard events in another thread - in this  
> case, use a Queue object to send events to the worker thread, from the  
> main thread where the message loop resides.
>
> --
> Gabriel Genellina

You are right however this case is a bit different. The application is
a keylogger which listens for keyboard events. The GUI is done using
Wx. They are different message loops. Under Linux I have no problem
however in the case of Windows I don't know how to stop the keylogger.

The Keylogger for Windows is very simple, see:
http://retypingdante.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/retypingdante/trunk/inferno/src/rtd_Wkeylog.py?view=markup

As you can see in the cancel function I cannot use
win32gui.PostQuitMessage(1) since it kills the whole app, including
Wx, and not just the thread. I cannot mix the eventloops of Windows
and Wx AFAIK so I put it in its own thread. I'm already using Queue
objects to pass the data between threads.

Arnaud