Here's my issue. I'm outputting directly to console and also getting user input via the terminal. Sometimes, the user is typing a thing and then the text they were typing gets messed up when the console outputs something. It doesn't break the program, it's just annoying.
I looked at ncurses in the npm catalog, but it seems pretty complicated. All I want is to print stuff to the screen without disrupting user input.
Any help, and I do mean any help, is very much appreciated.
How are you reading from the terminal? If you're doing it in "raw" mode where you get input for each character (or each few characters), then when you get a character, set an "output inhibit" flag and also set a timeout that will clear the flag when the user has stopped typing for a bit. Whatever does your output needs to check the flag and hold off if it's set.
Alternatively, if the user is typing line-by-line, you could set the flag on each character and then clear it (and simply flush your output) when they enter a newline.
If the terminal is in "cooked" mode (your code doesn't see anything until the user types a newline) there's really little you can unless you bite the ncurses bullet.