Does pygame.display.set_mode have to be used to utilize the keyboard keys? Once I added it to my code everything worked - but I do not want to open a pygame window.
Does anyone know how to utilize the keyboard without having to call pygame.display.set_mode ?
You have to use pygame.display.set_mode to create a window, since it's this very window that recieves the keyboard events from your OS' window manager.
You can run pygame without a window (by setting the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to "dummy"), but you can't recieve keyboard events with pygame then.
Maybe you want to look into low-level hooks (e.g. here's an example for windows).
