Yes­ter­day I was try­ing to fig­ure ou­ut some ob­scure in­put things in Co­braPy such as "de­tect­ing the En­ter key" and ran in­to a love­ly pack­age in PyP­I: Pym­put

What does it do? It lets you in­ject and read in­put events.

And by in­put events I mean mouse and­key­board.

And it does so in your whole ses­sion.

And you would­n't no­tice if it was do­ing that.

And it does this in 20 lines of friend­ly python code. Here, have a key­board snif­fer:

from pynput import keyboard

def on_press(key):
    try:
        print('alphanumeric key {0} pressed'.format(
            key.char))
    except AttributeError:
        print('special key {0} pressed'.format(
            key))

def on_release(key):
    print('{0} released'.format(
        key))
    if key == keyboard.Key.esc:
        # Stop listener
        return False

# Collect events until released
with keyboard.Listener(
        on_press=on_press,
        on_release=on_release) as listener:
    listener.join()

This is one of the rea­sons why Way­land (or Mir, I re­mem­ber Mir!) needs to hap­pen. It's triv­ial for any desk­top app to mon­i­tor ev­ery­thing you do. Of course nowa­days you al­so will see soft­ware ad­ver­tis­ing this, as a "fea­ture" where it's used to "mon­i­tor em­ploy­ee pro­duc­tiv­i­ty".

Be­cause re­mem­ber, of­ten things are on­ly il­le­gal when in­di­vid­u­als do them, if you are a com­pa­ny and are charg­ing for it, then Bob's your un­cle.