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Asked: 2026-05-31T17:09:54+00:00

I am currently using this code to grab key-strokes, but I am missing e.g.

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I am currently using this code to grab key-strokes, but I am missing e.g. Shift/Alt keys like
Ctrl+Shift+S, Ctrl+Shift+↑, Alt+S, etc.

  require 'curses'

  Curses.noecho
  Curses.raw
  Curses.stdscr.keypad(true)
  Curse.nonl

  count = 0
  loop do
    count = (count + 1) % 20
    key = Curses.getch
    break if key == ?\C-c
    Curses.setpos(count,0)
    Curses.addstr("#{key.inspect}     ");
  end

Is there any way to capture them all ?

Also: how can I distinguish Ctrl+J / Ctrl+M from Ctrl+Enter / Enter, which give the same key-codes (10/13)?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    also: how can distinguish ctrl+j / ctrl+m from ctr+enter / enter,
    which give the same key-codes (10/13)

    Long story short – you cannot. The terminal will almost-certainly yield the same bytes for each. Please read

    http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

    That said, if you are feeling especially brave, you can try my libtermkey

    http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtermkey/

    which will at least correctly parse things like Ctrl-arrow. It doesn’t (yet) have a Ruby binding, but the presence of both Perl and Python ones would suggest it should be quite easy to write one.

    Finally if you’re feeling even braver you can run the terminal I wrote, pangoterm, which has generic ways to encode any arbitrarily modified Unicode keys, so it can distinguish Ctrl-m from Enter, etc…

    https://launchpad.net/pangoterm

    However, outside of these, the answer remains “you cannot”.

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