Bug (with idea for fix): no evdev devices if user is not in input

[Nielius]

Bug behavior: no key presses were being detected (but there were no errors, so at first sight, it looked like everything should work)

Root cause: evdev.list_devices returned an empty list, because my user didn't have the right permissions. I solved it by adding my user to the input group (with sudo usermod -aG input your-username-here), as suggested here on stackoverflow, and restarting my computer. To diagnose if this is the problem, you only need to run python -c "import evdev; print(evdev.list_devices())".

---

IMO a nice way to fix this would be to check in the code if evdev.list_devices returns an empty list (probably here:

whisper-writer/src/key_listener.py

Line 445 in 370333b

self.devices = [evdev.InputDevice(path) for path in evdev.list_devices()]

), and if so, raise an exception with a possible solution (adding the user). Maybe we should also add this step to the installation instructions for Linux users.

If you like, I'd be happy to create a PR with this fix :)