SDL2 does not receive keyboard events while running in Debian minimum (console only - No X or Wayland Window managers)

Question

Making a Kiosk type application using PySDL2 on Debian 12

From my searching on this subject it appears that keyboard events are not going to be processed explicitly because I'm not using X or Wayland or other window manager because input evets are captured and forwarded by the window: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44778430/2175010

If this is indeed the case, then how can I get my app to take keyboard inputs? Maybe another library? After all the console takes keyboard inputs.

Here is my code. There is a print command that's supposed to appear upon any event is captured and I do not see it showing up no matter what key I press.

import ctypes
import sys
from sdl2 import *
import time

SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_EVENTS)


w = SDL_CreateWindow(b"test", 0,0, 800,600, SDL_WINDOW_INPUT_FOCUS | SDL_WINDOW_FULLSCREEN_DESKTOP | SDL_WINDOW_HIDDEN)
SDL_ShowWindow(w)
SDL_RaiseWindow(w)

window_surface = SDL_GetWindowSurface(w)
r = SDL_CreateSoftwareRenderer(window_surface)
#r = sdl2.ext.Renderer(w, -1, (800,600), sdl2.SDL_RENDERER_SOFTWARE)

#sprite_factory = sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory(sdl2.ext.TEXTURE, renderer=r)
#sprite = sprite_factory.from_image("resources/imgs/fr.png")

event = SDL_Event()

running = True
while running:

    while SDL_PollEvent(event) != 0:
        print("events were present", event.key.keysym.sym)
        #print(SDL_GetKeyName(event.key.keysym.sym))
        if event.type == SDL_QUIT:
            running = False


        if event.type == SDL_KEYDOWN:
            #if event.key.keysym.sym == sdl2.SDLK_ESCAPE:
            running = False
            print("keydown detected")


        if event.type == SDL_TEXTINPUT:
            print("text was inputed")


    SDL_RenderClear(r)

    #sprite_render = sprite_factory.create_sprite_render_system(r)
    #sprite_render.render(sprite, x=100, y=100)

    #WHITE = sdl2.ext.Color(255,255,255,255)
    #r.draw_rect((5,5,64,64), WHITE)

    SDL_UpdateWindowSurface(w)
    SDL_RenderPresent(r)

SDL_DestroyWindow(w)
SDL_Quit()