Input engine

Joel joelcnz at gmail.com
Mon Sep 16 02:05:37 UTC 2019


On Sunday, 15 September 2019 at 10:52:43 UTC, rikki cattermole 
wrote:
> On 15/09/2019 12:16 PM, Joel wrote:
>> What is a good keyboard input handler or so? Just need one 
>> that picks up that a key is down, but not like a word 
>> processor.
>
> Are you referring to when you hold down a key and multiple 
> characters gets added to the text area?
>
> If so, this feature is called auto-repeat and is implemented by 
> the kernel on input from keyboard.
>
> This is easily detected for Windows and can be disabled with 
> X11.
>
> Windowing libraries like GLFW offer telling you if an event was 
> an auto-repeat GLFW_REPEAT[0]. SDL[1] has it too under the 
> repeat field, and so does Allegro in the event 
> ALLEGRO_EVENT_KEY_CHAR[2].
>
> If you have a windowing library that forces auto-repeat on you, 
> then you can use a map (with a lookup table to optimize for 
> ASCII as that will be mostly what you will get with it) to 
> check if the key is currently down.
>
> If you have a windowing library that forces auto-repeat to be 
> off, then you can use a map (with a lookup table to optimize 
> for ASCII) and then use a timer and trigger your own internal 
> to program auto repeat event.
>
> [0] https://www.glfw.org/docs/latest/group__input.html
> [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_KeyboardEvent
> [2] https://www.allegro.cc/manual/5/ALLEGRO_EVENT

I was using DSFML 2.1.1[0] for keyboard input, but with the last 
macOS update, it just crashes my programs, (it was unstable 
anyway). I have my own wrapper[0] for handling key pressers. I 
just need to know when (a) key(s) is/are down (and what key(s)). 
I still want to use DSFML for other stuff (like graphics).

I've had the whole macOS crash, with trying to get Allegro 
working on it with code that works on Windows OS. I haven't got 
any SDL program working - DLangUI programs compile and work 
though.

[0] https://code.dlang.org/packages/dsfml
[1] https://github.com/joelcnz/JecLib


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