I have been looking for an equivalent to kbhit() and I have read several forums on this subject, and the majority seems to suggest using ncurses.
How should I go about checking if a key is pressed in c++ using ncurses.
The function getch() provided by ncurses reads character from the window.
I would like to write a function that only checks if there is a key press and then I want to do getch().
Thanks in advance.
You can use the nodelay()
function to turn getch()
into a non-blocking call, which returns ERR
if no key-press is available. If a key-press is available, it is pulled from the input queue, but you can push it back onto the queue if you like with ungetch()
.
#include <ncurses.h>
#include <unistd.h> /* only for sleep() */
int kbhit(void)
{
int ch = getch();
if (ch != ERR) {
ungetch(ch);
return 1;
} else {
return 0;
}
}
int main(void)
{
initscr();
cbreak();
noecho();
nodelay(stdscr, TRUE);
scrollok(stdscr, TRUE);
while (1) {
if (kbhit()) {
printw("Key pressed! It was: %d\n", getch());
refresh();
} else {
printw("No key pressed yet...\n");
refresh();
sleep(1);
}
}
}