Pygame Text Input Module

This module provides two utility classes that simplify entering text using pygame. The classes are:

• TextInputVisualizer which can be used to both manage and draw text input. Simply pass all events returned by pygame.event.get() to it every frame, and blit its surface attribute on the screen.
• TextInputManager that can be used to just manage inputted text, with no visual aspect. Used by TextInputVisualizer behind the scenes.

Installation

Simplest way is using pypi:

python3 -m pip install pygame-textinput

Usage

Visualizer

The easiest way is to TextInputVisualizer without any arguments. Then, feed all pygame events to its update method every frame, and blit it's surface property to the screen. Here's a minimal example:

import pygame_textinput
import pygame
pygame.init()

# Create TextInput-object
textinput = pygame_textinput.TextInputVisualizer()

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((1000, 200))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

while True:
    screen.fill((225, 225, 225))

    events = pygame.event.get()

    # Feed it with events every frame
    textinput.update(events)
    # Blit its surface onto the screen
    screen.blit(textinput.surface, (10, 10))

    for event in events:
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            exit()

    pygame.display.update()
    clock.tick(30)

Notes on the newer version:

• You have to watch for "return" presses by the user yourself, e.g. like this:

for event in events:
    ...
    if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and event.key == pygame.K_RETURN:
        print("Oooweee")

• Contrary to the old version, key-stroke repeats are not manually introduced anymore, since they can now be enabled within pygame directly:

pygame.key.set_repeat(200, 25) # press every 50 ms after waiting 200 ms

This new version has also been optimized such that you can modify any fields on the fly and the actual surface will only re-render if you access it using textinput.surface - and only if you actually modified any values.

Arguments / Fields:

All these values can be both specified as arguments to the constructor and modified at later time by setting them as attributes (e.g. textinput.font_color = (255, 0, 0)). The surface itself will only re-render once it is accessed via textinput.surface.

Argument	Description
manager	The TextInputManager used to manage the input
font_object	The pygame.font.Font object used for rendering
antialias	whether to render the font antialiased or not
font_color	color of font rendered
cursor_blink_interval	The interval of the cursor blinking, in ms
cursor_width	The width of the cursor, in pixels
cursor_color	The color of the cursor

Manager

If you prefer to draw the text on the screen yourself, you can use TextInputManager to only manage the string that has been typed so far.

Like TextInputVisualizer, you feed its update method all events received by pygame.event.get() which you want it to process. TextInputVisualizer does this for you inside its update method if you pass it a TextInputManager.

Arguments:

Argument	Description
initial	The initial value (text)
validator	A function taking a string and returning a bool. Every time an input modifies the value, this function is called with the modified value as an argument; if the function returns True, the input is accepted, otherwise the input is ignored.

So say you want to only allow input to up to 5 letters, you could do that with

manager = TextInputManager(validator=lambda input: len(input) <= 5)

Fields

Field	Description
value	The inserted value so far. When change, cursor_pos is kept as far as possible.
cursor_pos	The position of the cursor. 0 is before the first character, len(manager.value) the position after the last. Values outside this range are clamped.

Example

Here's an example that shows most features:

import pygame
import pygame.locals as pl

pygame.init()

# No arguments needed to get started
textinput = TextInputVisualizer()

# But more customization possible: Pass your own font object
font = pygame.font.SysFont("Consolas", 55)
# Create own manager with custom input validator
manager = TextInputManager(validator = lambda input: len(input) <= 5)
# Pass these to constructor
textinput_custom = TextInputVisualizer(manager=manager, font_object=font)
# Customize much more
textinput_custom.cursor_width = 4
textinput_custom.cursor_blink_interval = 400 # blinking interval in ms
textinput_custom.antialias = False
textinput_custom.font_color = (0, 85, 170)

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((1000, 200))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

# Pygame now allows natively to enable key repeat:
pygame.key.set_repeat(200, 25)

while True:
    screen.fill((225, 225, 225))

    events = pygame.event.get()

    # Feed it with events every frame
    textinput.update(events)
    textinput_custom.update(events)

    # Get its surface to blit onto the screen
    screen.blit(textinput.surface, (10, 10))
    screen.blit(textinput_custom.surface, (10, 50))

    # Modify attributes on the fly - the surface is only rerendered when .surface is accessed & if values changed
    textinput_custom.font_color = [(c+10)%255 for c in textinput_custom.font_color]

    # Check if user is exiting or pressed return
    for event in events:
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            exit()

        if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and event.key == pygame.K_RETURN:
            print(f"User pressed enter! Input so far: {textinput.value}")

    pygame.display.update()
    clock.tick(30)