Issues with example apps on Windows ?

[timmaffett]

I have attempted to run the various example apps in the windows command window and in powershell windows and I cannot seem to get any example that takes arrow keys, ESC key or mouse input to work. Is there a trick to doing this ?

I have not taken then time to try in on my linux or macos terminals but i am assuming these work there.

Thanks!

[Norbert515]

Hey!

Some examples might be slightly outdated and mouse support is currently limited to the mouse wheel for scrolling. I haven't really tested on Windows myself.

I'll give it a try on Windows in the evening. Which examples did you try?

[timmaffett]

I attempted to try most of them - arrow keys, ESC key and scroll wheel did not work when instructions asked for that input. TAB key and enter did -
I was just doing dart run XYZ.dart and going through the list.

I would Ctrl-C to quit (and then console would ask if I wanted to abort batch file and I would reply 'Y') -
I seem to remember on of the examples asked for Ctrl-C as an input also.. - and one of the examples 'hung' the terminal and I had to close the window.

I am excited about the future possibilities - I started to look into the details of supporting things like mouse input in windows consoles SetConsoleMode() . I don't know if the dart sdk does this or something like the win32 package would need to be used to access it..

[timmaffett]

I am sure you are familiar with https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink - but I was thinking that there might be knowledge there about getting consoles into the correct modes for various input types.

[Norbert515]

I was able to reproduce the arrow key bug on Windows. Working on a fix!

[Norbert515]

Regarding setting up the console to receive mouse info etc. that should all work using ANSI escape character which are implemented by the terminal emulators.

I tried to stay clear of an OS specific APIs where possible so all these features also work over, for example, an SSH connection.

[Norbert515]

I need to correct myself, for 'real' raw mode we do indeed need to use some sort of FFI other. Currently, the terminal is setup into a 'semi raw' mode using ASNI character.

[timmaffett]

OK - I researched this more also and discovered that the windows terminal stdin has it's own unique handling of the mouse (and various special keys).
I am finishing a PR which wraps the stdin on the windows platform so that it hides all of the windows specific nonsense and converts it to the 'standard' ANSI CSI codes that terminals on Linux and MacOS produce. This requires only using the wrapped stdin for windows instead of the dart stdin global. The rest of the code within nocterm can then just assume all platforms behave identically (as 'proper' ANSI CSI producers).

There may be other things missing we need to wrap for stdout also - but for now my wrapped stdin behaves as if it was a 'normal' terminal stdin corresponding to a terminal stdout which received these ANSI commands:
// ESC [ ? 1000 h - Send Mouse X & Y on button press and release
// ESC [ ? 1002 h - Use Cell Motion Mouse Tracking
// ESC [ ? 1003 h - Enable all motion mouse tracking
// ESC [ ? 1006 h - Enable SGR mouse mode

and then sends along the proper mouse and keypress events via standard ANSI CSI.

The PR for now includes this Win32A win32_stdin wrapper class code as well, but I see general usefulness for this so I will be releasing a win32_ansi_stdin

I will finish this PR in the next couple hours - for now I will push what I have so you can check it out.