Question

How would I output text one letter at a time like it’s typing without using Sleep() for every character?

Answer 1

Sleeping is the best way to do what you’re describing, as the alternative, busy waiting, is just going to waste CPU cycles. From the comments, it sounds like you’ve been trying to manually hard-code every single character you want printed with a sleep call, instead of using loops…

Since there’s been no indication that this is homework after ~20 minutes, I thought I’d post this code. It uses usleep from <unistd.h>, which sleeps for X amount of microseconds, if you’re using Windows try Sleep().

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void type_text(char *s, unsigned ms_delay)
{
   unsigned usecs = ms_delay * 1000; /* 1000 microseconds per ms */

   for (; *s; s++) {
      putchar(*s);
      fflush(stdout); /* alternatively, do once: setbuf(stdout, NULL); */
      usleep(usecs);
   }
}

int main(void)
{
   type_text("hello world\n", 100);
   return 0;
}

Since stdout is buffered, you’re going to have to either flush it after printing each character (fflush(stdout)), or set it to not buffer the output at all by running setbuf(stdout, NULL) once.

The above code will print "hello world\n" with a delay of 100ms between each character; extremely basic.