How to create MS Paint clone with Python and pygame

Question

As I see it, there are two ways to handle mouse events to draw a picture.

The first is to detect when the mouse moves and draw a line to where the mouse is, shown he

Answer 1

Here's a simplified version of Matthew's example which is unfortunately not runnable.

When the mouse is moved, pygame.MOUSEMOTION events are added to the event queue which contain the position and the relative movement. You can use these to calculate the previous position and then pass the two points to pygame.draw.line.

pygame.MOUSEMOTION events also have a buttons attribute which you can use to check which mouse button is currently down.

import os
import random

import pygame as pg


class App:

    def __init__(self):
        os.environ['SDL_VIDEO_CENTERED'] = '1'
        pg.init()
        self.w, self.h = 800, 600
        self.screen = pg.display.set_mode((self.w, self.h))
        self.screen.fill(pg.Color('white'))
        self.clock = pg.time.Clock()
        self.drawcolor = (0, 0, 0)

    def mainloop(self):
        while True:
            for event in pg.event.get():
                if event.type == pg.QUIT:
                    return
                elif event.type == pg.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN:
                    if event.button == 2:  # Color picker (middle mouse button).
                        self.drawcolor = self.screen.get_at(pos)
                        # Pick a random color.
                        # self.drawcolor = [random.randrange(256) for _ in range(3)]
                elif event.type == pg.MOUSEMOTION:
                    pos, rel = event.pos, event.rel
                    if event.buttons[0]:  # If the left mouse button is down.
                        # Draw a line from the pos to the previous pos.
                        pg.draw.line(self.screen, self.drawcolor, pos, (pos[0]-rel[0], pos[1]-rel[1]), 5)
                    elif event.buttons[2]:  # If the right mouse button is down.
                        # Erase by drawing a circle.
                        pg.draw.circle(self.screen, (255, 255, 255), pos, 30)

            pg.display.flip()
            self.clock.tick(30)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = App()
    app.mainloop()
    pg.quit()