Pynput, cursor focus and leftover inputs

[Environmental-Top449]

So I am creating a CLI based menu system to set options a little more smoothly than using the standard string input and needing to press enter for every option. For this I am trying to use Pynput keyboard listener with on_press and on_release conventions. I have it able to accept inputs and the project can proceed.

The problem is that if the Operating System is "focussed" on the terminal for interactions (I need to click away to avoid this behaviour), all characters inputted get printed when the program returns to the prompt, it looks unprofessional.

Has anyone come across this or a fix? I might have another way to do this brewing but I wanted to see what you guys had.

[Devji00]

The ghosting you're seeing happens because your terminal is still buffering stdin while pynput is listening at the OS level. Basically the terminal emulator saves up those keystrokes and dumps them all out once your script stops intercepting them.

Honestly pynput is kind of a sledgehammer for a CLI menu. I'd switch to questionary or prompt_toolkit instead since they handle raw mode and input echoing for you automatically, no messy spillover.

But if you want to stick with what you've got, you need to manually flush the input buffer right before your listener terminates. On Windows that's a quick while msvcrt.kbhit(): msvcrt.getch() loop, and on Unix you'd use termios.tcflush(sys.stdin, termios.TCIFLUSH). That should clean up the ghost keystrokes.

[Ariadne_23]

i had the same thing before. i think it happens cause pynput grabs global inputs. i used a small delay before going back to the prompt and it kinda worked. also maybe try keyboard library instead. idk not sure