How to capture keyboard events similar to BGE Game Keys

I’m looking for a relatively simple way to capture key presses in “normal blender” (not the Game Engine). I’ve been googling for the past two days and it looks like the only “simple” way is to use a model operator, which doesn’t work for my purposes since I want to call them while running rigid body simulation.
It’s also possible when creating a custom addon (with keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that without creating a new addon.

I want to tie the key presses to functions, but even just using the keys to change something that a script can pick up on, like changing the location/rotation of an object, or change the value of a custom property would be good enough.

Any help would be appreciated.

file>user preferences>addon>in search box type “screencast”