How to efficiently hold a key in Pygame?

Question

I\'ve found two related questions:

• Pygame hold key down causes an infinite loop
• pygame - on hold button down

But I want to be specific. H

Answer 1

Don't mix up event.get() and key.get_pressed().

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If you press or release a key, and event is put into the event queue, which you query with event.get(). Do this if you're actually interested if a key was pressed down physically or released (these are the actual keyboard events. Note that KEYDOWN get's added multiple time to the queue depending on the key-repeat settings).

Also, there's no need to query the state of all keys while handling a KEYDOWN event, since you already know which key is pressed down by checking event.key

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If you're interested in if a key is hold down (and ignoring the key-repeat, which you probably want), then you should simply use key.get_pressed(). Using a bunch of flags is just unnecessary and will clutter up your code.

So your code could simplified to:

while not done: 
    keys = key.get_pressed() 
    if keys[K_DOWN]: 
        print "DOWN" 
    for e in event.get(): 
        pass # proceed other events. 
             # always call event.get() or event.poll() in the main loop