• A complete hotkey manager
• Demonstrates integrating the system tray into your application
• Example sophisticated docstring formatting application of a hotkey

At the moment, customizing your menu and hotkeys is done by editing the source code. Be careful when upgrading that you don't lose edits you have made.

The latest official release of PySimpleGUI products can be found on PyPI. To pip install the demo applications from PyPI, use this command

python -m pip install --upgrade psghotkey

python3 -m pip install --upgrade psghotkey

You can also pip install the PySimpleGUI Applications that are in the PySimpleGUI GitHub account. The GitHub versions have bug fixes and new programs/features that have not yet been released to PyPI. To directly pip install from that repo:

python -m pip install --upgrade https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/psghotkey/zipball/main

python3 -m pip install --upgrade https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/psghotkey/zipball/main

Once installed, launch psghotkey by typing the following in your command line:

psghotkey

This project uses these pip installable packages:

• PySimpleGUI
• psgtray
• keyboard

This project is a mash-up of some PySimpleGUI demo programs and a program called pingmote. The pingmote project is the origin of the keyboard handler. A big thank you to @dchen327 for the code and inspiration.

The system tray code is from the psgtray. The psgtray package is an important add-on to the tkinter port of PySimpleGUI as it enables you to run your applications in the system tray.

psgtray runs the best on Windows and is used in this project. It's not been tried on Linux (recently) nor the Mac.

Not a lot of time was spent on the entire project. It was some personal utilities that I wrote for myself and then reaslized that maybe others would want to extend their IDEs as well or do other hotkey kind of operations.

In this project, they keyboard handler hooks in at a low level such that all keystrokes will be passed to the program. The keyboard package likely has a more efficient and higher level interface that's not being used.

"Satisfice" is a word I recently discovered and realized it matches the prototype code that I write. It's pretty hacky kind of code as it's meant to do a specific job, on my system, and not designed in a high general purpose way. It's the "first pass" code... raw, simple, working stuff but not much more than that. It should at least work on your system though, assuming you're able to run psgtray and PySimpleGUI.

I hope you are able to find something here that helps you create your own tools that makes you more efficient.

Copyright 2023-2026 PySimpleGUI.

Licensed under LGPL3.

We are happy to receive issues describing bug reports and feature requests! If your bug report relates to a security vulnerability, please do not file a public issue, and please instead reach out to us at issues@PySimpleGUI.com.

We do not accept (and do not wish to receive) contributions of user-created or third-party code, including patches, pull requests, or code snippets incorporated into submitted issues. Please do not send us any such code! Bug reports and feature requests should not include any source code.

If you nonetheless submit any user-created or third-party code to us, (1) you assign to us all rights and title in or relating to the code; and (2) to the extent any such assignment is not fully effective, you hereby grant to us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, unlimited, sublicensable, transferrable license under all intellectual property rights embodied therein or relating thereto, to exploit the code in any manner we choose, including to incorporate the code into PySimpleGUI and to redistribute it under any terms at our discretion.