Read a character from standard input in Go (without pressing Enter)

Question

I want to my app shows:

press any key to exit ...

And when I pressed any key, it exits.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

This is a minimal working example for those running a UNIX system:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"
    "os/exec"
)

func main() {
    // disable input buffering
    exec.Command("stty", "-F", "/dev/tty", "cbreak", "min", "1").Run()
    // do not display entered characters on the screen
    exec.Command("stty", "-F", "/dev/tty", "-echo").Run()

    var b []byte = make([]byte, 1)
    for {
        os.Stdin.Read(b)
        fmt.Println("I got the byte", b, "("+string(b)+")")
    }
}

Answer 2

Try this - http://play.golang.org/p/kg-QirlucY.

Just read from the os.Stdin at the end of the func main

Answer 3

termbox-go is a light-weight Go-native package which offers some rudimentary terminal control. Including the ability to get input in raw mode (read one character at a time without the default line-buffered behaviour).

It also has fairly ok compatibility across different systems.

And keyboard extends termbox-go to give some additional keyboard functionality like multi-key shortcuts and sequences.

Answer 4

go-termbox is very heavyweight. It wants to take over the entire terminal window. For example, it clears the screen on startup, which may not be what you want.

I put this together on OSX. Just a tiny getchar():

https://github.com/paulrademacher/climenu/blob/master/getchar.go

Answer 5

You can read a single key-press from a terminal in raw mode. Here is a package that should provide raw terminal mode to your program. Catch: it's Linux only.

Answer 6

You could use this library (mine): https://github.com/eiannone/keyboard

This is an example for getting a single keystroke:

char, _, err := keyboard.GetSingleKey()
if (err != nil) {
    panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("You pressed: %q\r\n", char)