Accept key commands at any time without prompting

Question

Accept key commands at any time without prompting

I'm trying to write a node.js CLI utility that periodically logs to the screen but should also allow someone to enter a key command at any time without being prompted. Something like the command bar in Vim is probably the closest analog. That said, I'm not sure where to start and don't even know what you'd call this behavior.

node.js
shell
command-line-interface

Answer 1

Don't know node-CLI, but youre probably looking for somethings what in bash could write as:

stty -echo
while :
do
        read -t 1 -n 1 key
        case "$key" in
                '') ;;  #nothing
                q) stty sane; exit ;;
                a|d) echo "left-right" ;;
                w|s) echo "up-down" ;;
                *) echo "unknown $key" ;;
        esac
done

try it. (press q for exit)