Question

I’m trying to add some details to a terminal application that I’m creating with ncurses.

The application is something like a quiz with timeout… if the user wastes too much time, timeout happens and cleans the screen.

Now the problem: how can I show the text that the user had inserted before timeout and edit/reedit if he wants?

Example:

Q:Do you feel happy? (correct answer Yes, I feel happy)

A:Yes, I fe (TIMEOUT, clean the screen, question is printed again but no “Yes, I fe” is printed).

I don’t know if there is any possibility to add this to the stdin buffer or line buffer…

Ideas…

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

You could do it like that:

• disable blocking keyboard reads by calling nodelay(stdscr, TRUE);
• in a loop, check if a key was pressed using getch() and checking if it returns a value>0
  • if yes, process the key as usual
  • else sleep a few microseconds(no busy waiting!) using usleep() and check for timeout; if the timeout happened, process it