Get console user input as typed, char by char

Question

I have a console application in Elixir. I need to interpret user’s input on by keypress basis. For instance, I need to treat “q” as a command to end the session, without use

Answer 1

Your program doesn't get the keys because on Linux, the terminal is by default in cooked mode, which buffers all keypresses until Return is pressed.

You need to switch your terminal to raw mode, which sends the keypresses to the application as soon as they happen. There's no cross-platform to do this.

For unix-like systems there's ncurses, which has an elixir binding that you should check out: https://github.com/jfreeze/ex_ncurses. It even has an example to do what you want.