Put differently, they're making the transition from Linux as a commodity used to build the thing they're dreaming of to Linux as a critical design component.

For example, he calls out in the beginning: > They are interested in performing some real-time based task that is controlled using keyboard presses. In my case, the goal was to remotely navigate a robot over an SSH connection using the 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' keys.

As the author discovers, that's fundamentally not how SSH works. This sort of behavior could be achieved using other mechanisms, but it's not even really an issue of the tty/pty. They're just trying to map a functional model from a different operating system to Linux.

As to the discussion of keyboard handling moves into Python code I would have again, gone a different path.

When the author took a turn into Python my first thought was this is trivial for evdev to handle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evdev / https://python-evdev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

Next thing I know they touch on the kernel mechanisms managed by evdev.... And pivot across to X11 (which would seem to make sense until one realizes that the transition to Wayland from X11 is far further along than a layperson might imagine).

In the end a good write up which shows a lot of "raw power" on the part of the author. With some additional tutilage, exploration, or guidance they to really take their understanding to the next level.

For the folks who are in the weeds (like me) it is a good guided tour. Seeing into the "beginners mind" (and taking it to heart) can provide perspective as to how to make software more intuitive.

(Typed and butchered from my phone).

It can grab joystick/gamepad events though since it reads those directly. In that case you have to enumerate then specify which gamepad/joystick device to use so it can open the correct /dev/ path.

I have a planned change to use this a default, and fall back to /dev/input on non-X systems. It's not quite there yet, especially the capability of suppressing key events.