Why can't we read one character at a time from System.in?

Question

The program below prints each character written on standard in, but only after a new-line has been written (at least on my system!).

public class Test {
             


        

Answer 1

What is the underlying reason for this?

Most terminals is line buffered by default, Java does not receive input until a newline.

Is it a limitation of Java?

Some ancient terminals might only have line-buffered input; though it should be possible to disable buffering in most modern terminal.

Is this behavior system-dependent (I'm on Ubuntu)? How does it work on Mac? Windows?

Yes.

Is it dependent on the specific terminal I run the application in? (For me it behaves like this in Eclipse and in gnome-terminal)

Yes.

Is there a workaround?

There are platform specific hacks. curse in Linux and Unix-like platforms, and getch() in Windows. I'm not aware of any cross-platform way.

related: Why "Press any key to continue" is bad idea: