As a project that I've set myself, I'm working on a simple pager, such as "less". Of course it would be best practice to build this pager on top of ncurses. It's my first time working with ncurses, though I've read the TLDP How-to on ncurses and I've reasonably familiarized myself with the API. Currently, I'm facing only one specific problem.

A pager should be able to take input both from filename arguments, as in and from standard input: But, a pager's key commands, such as Space for one screenful forward and the b key for one screenful backward, also have to be intercepted. And, if the pager's input comes from stdin then it can't read these keys by reading stdin.

My reference is an old Unix implementation of a pager, and the idea used there to intercept these keys is to read from the terminal device directly (and not from stdin).

As I understand, getch() is the standard way of getting character input in ncurses. Is there any way to make getch() read from the terminal device and not stdin?

Thanks!

I can see a couple of alternatives.

1. Duplicate the file descriptor for stdin to a new number and then reopen FD 0 to /dev/tty before calling initscr(). Then you use the new FD for reading stdin and use ncurses as normal.
   
2. Open /dev/tty to a new FD and call newterm() and newwin() on it instead of using initscr(). You then have to use the window specific ncurses functions (such as wgetch()), but can treat stdin as normal.

Personally, I'd go with the second.

2 members found this post helpful.

This does the job, thanks GazL!

1 members found this post helpful.

You're welcome. Just out of interest, which option did you go with?

Well, as you said, the second - I did a small test which suggests that it will do the job. I'll soon post a working snippet (in case this thread is of use to anybody else). You are right of course in recommending the second; it would certainly be desirable to avoid meddling with stdin.

1 members found this post helpful.