I'm having some problems getting ncurses' getch() to block. Default operation seems to be non-blocking (or have I missed some initialization)? I would like it to work like getch() in Windows. I have tried various versions of
timeout(3000000);
nocbreak();
cbreak();
noraw();
etc...
(not all at the same time). I would prefer to not (explicitly) use any WINDOW
, if possible. A while
loop around getch(), checking for a specific return value is OK too.
The curses library is a package deal. You can't just pull out one routine and hope for the best without properly initializing the library. Here's a code that correctly blocks on getch()
:
#include <curses.h>
int main(void) {
initscr();
timeout(-1);
int c = getch();
endwin();
printf ("%d %c\n", c, c);
return 0;
}
You need to call initscr()
or newterm()
to initialize curses before it will work. This works fine for me:
#include <ncurses.h>
int main() {
WINDOW *w;
char c;
w = initscr();
timeout(3000);
c = getch();
endwin();
printf("received %c (%d)\n", c, (int) c);
}
From a man page (emphasis added):
The timeout
and wtimeout
routines set blocking or non-blocking read for
a given window. If delay
is negative, blocking read is used (i.e.,
waits indefinitely for input).