From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2006-08-03T07:05:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Loop Timing and Constant Input

Eric Armstrong wrote:
> Picklegnome wrote:
>>
>> how can I get input from the keyboard without the user pressing enter?
>  >
> For a platform independent operation, I recently
> began investigating "Curses":
> 
>   require 'curses'
>   include Curses
> 
> operations to play with:
>    clear   -- clear the screen
>    addstr  -- append text to the buffer
>    refresh -- display the text in the buffer
>    getch   -- get a character
>               (compare to ?x, for example, to
>                test for the letter "x")
> 
> I have a getting-started template, but neglected
> to push it to the web. Ask me again tomorrow...
> 
> So far, I've found two problems with curses:
> 
>   a) There doesn't seem to be any equivalent for the
>      windows Kbhit. That's the nice little operation
>      that lets you ask whether there is a character
>      in the buffer, and proceed if there isn't any.
> 
>   b) Examining the Curses API at
>      http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/, I found what
>      can only be described as an embarassing lack of
>      commentary. Not even one word! And since it's
>      a wrapper, the implementation code is of no help.
>      (And curses isn't even mentioned here:
>      http://www.rubymanual.org/list/classes)
> 
>      I can only assume that some form of standard
>      operational documentation exists on the web.
>      If so the API doc should point to it, at least.
>      (It's difficult to find, assuming it exists,
>      because of all the references to NCURSES. That
>      seems to be good, but the APIs are a wrapper
>      for an ncurses.lib, which raises the ugly spectre
>      of installation issues in my non-standard
>      location. When I tried that with htree, I got
>      horrible ".so" not found errors that no one
>      could help with--so I abandoned htree for another
>      day.)
> 
> Searching on "curses API", I did find these papers:
> 

O'Reilly published "Programming with curses" in 1991 if you can find a 
copy of the book.


> Curses in Python
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/ActivePython/2.3/howto/curses/curses.html 
> 
> 
> Tutorial on Python Curses Programming
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Python/PyCurses.pdf
> 
> On my solaris box there is also man page for curses,
> but it lists dozens of APIs that aren't in the ruby library--and to find 
> out what they do, you have to look
> them up individually.
> 
> Still, *nix users have a way to find out what the
> APIs are expected to do. Windows users are SOL, unless
> someone can point me to a good man-page => html conversion
> tool. (The utility I wrote goes in the other direction,
> unfortunately.)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>