libtermkey - read keypresses from terminals

I have just released version 0.8 of libtermkey. It contains a small set of bugfixes on the previous version (0.7), relating to handling the signal-raising keys (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-\, Ctrl-Z), gracefully handles EINTR from read(2) calls, and actually gets around to implementing the CSI u modified Unicode encoding scheme I documented a long time ago.

libtermkey is a library for reading keypress events (and in fact mouse events too) from a terminal, in a terminal-based application. I won't list all its points and features, but as a brief overview:

• It presents events to the application in a structure, containing basic key information and a bitfield of modifiers in effect, rather than a single flat enumeration integer, as curses tries to do. In this way, it can easily represent the various modifier-combinations on cursor keys, like arrows or PageUp/PageDown, and can easily represent any Unicode character vs. any special key.


• It supplies a pair of functions (termkey_strfkey and termkey_strpkey) for converting between these structural notations and plain-text human-readable strings, such as "Ctrl-PageUp". These assist with easy reporting of keypresses in applications, or for config file parsing.


• Perl bindings exist, primarily in the form of Term::TermKey.

Wearing Two Hats

A while ago, I wrote libtermkey, a C library for reading keypress events from a terminal. I wrote a Perl binding for it, Term::TermKey. On a separate note, I also maintain IO::Async, an event framework for Perl. Naturally, the combination of these two lead me to write an IO::Async module to handle libtermkey, Term::TermKey::Async. These all work together quite well.

However, these two things are separate considerations. There's nothing specific to Perl, in libtermkey, nor anything specific to IO::Async in Term::TermKey. After some thought, and discussions on #perl, I decided in the end, that I had to realise these were two separate concerns, two different problem domains, that neither should be allowed to influence the other. In short, I had to wear two hats.

With my libtermkey hat on, I went to join #poe and #anyevent on irc.perl.org, and talked my way around designing two new modules, which are now happily sitting on CPAN as well: POE::Wheel::TermKey and AnyEvent::TermKey.

With so many CPAN modules effectively being glue between two others (such as in the case of Term::TermKey::Async being the glue between Term::TermKey and IO::Async), it's often the case that at least one if not both sides of the module are written by the same author. It is important to recognise these cases, and to consider whether the community as a whole would be better served by taking a look around to see if other modules and other use cases need attention as well.

When wearing hats, it is important to remember which hat you are wearing, and only try to wear one hat at once.