Question

I am writing this chat program that uses ncurses as the interface. How am I suppose to simultaneously handle the socket file descriptors and user interation? My idea is below. The problem is now the loop only executes once for each button I press. How do I structure my program such that the sockets and user interaction are handled immediately once they are ready? I tried just having my poll include the file descriptors for standard input and output, but that does not work.

while(ch = getch()) {
   poll sockets
   loop sockets {
      ...
   }
   switch(ch) {
      ...
   }
} 

Also as a more general question. How does one typically write programs that handles user interaction and other things going on at once? It seems like there would be a standard way of doing this.

Answer 1

You can try nodelay() on your input screen.

nodelay(stdscr,TRUE); // turn off getch() blocking

while(getch() == ERR)
{
    //do other stuff
}
else
    //handle input

But chances are you may want to go to threading down the line.