I promise that this is the final post dealing with reading a mouse in a terminal window. It’s a weird thing to do without a specific library in C, but made possible thanks to ANSI codes and the standard I/O programming necessary to read and store the data.
Continue reading
Of all the crazy stuff that happens in the realm of mathematics, I’m certain that mathematicians must enjoy solving math puzzles — just like I assume that good programmers enjoy solving programming puzzles.
Continue reading
The point of reading and capturing mouse data is to do something at the mouse’s location. Specifically, the goal is to have the terminal somehow react to a mouse click. Yes, even though C is stream oriented and rarely involves graphics or the mouse, this feat is made possible thanks to ANSI commands.
Continue reading
Spewing data all over the screen might look impressive, as shown in last week’s Lesson, but the point of knowing where the mouse is and what it’s doing is to capture its data and make it available to your program for interpretation.
Continue reading
Monitoring the mouse in a terminal window happens thanks to various ANSI commands. Last week’s Lesson demonstrated how mouse clicks are detected. By issuing another ANSI command, the mouse’s location data is obtained, but doing so carelessly can create a horrid mess.
Continue reading
This month’s C programming exercise is to extract numbers from a string. Specifically, your task is to code the extract() function that returns the address of a digit found in a string. This function must also be capable of repeat calls to continue locating digits within the same string.
Continue reading
Continuing from last week’s Lesson, once activated and configured, the output that mouse activity generates in a terminal window looks something like this:
Continue reading
Rarely in your programming journey will you encounter a situation where the data you need just pops up fresh, exactly the way you want it. The best situation is where the data is somehow formatted, which makes finding the tidbit you want easier. But often the data is unformatted, which makes fetching that one useful morsel a bit tricky.
Continue reading
After I bought a mouse for my first PC, I set out to write a mouse-based program — a game. (The Microsoft Mouse manual came with the full API.) It was fun and challenging, as all programming tasks should be. Surprisingly, reading the mouse is also possible in a Linux terminal window — providing that you know the secret.
Continue reading
While raw terminal input allows standard I/O functions to capture uncooked text, another approach for reading the terminal may also capture a few uncooked morsels. This process involves using low-level file I/O commands. These functions are read() and write(), which are part of the POSIX standard.
Continue reading