Conio for C++

A cross-platform, sanitised, C++ replacement for conio.h.

Introduction

There is no good reason to use conio.h at this time and age. Maybe you're a wee kid who's just heard of getch and system and is inspired to write the next greatest console game. Or maybe you're a student, forced to use conio.h for the sake of 'education'. Buf if you're a grown-ass dev trying to make this abomination work just because, please take a look at notcurses because you deserve better.

This library, like conio.h and its use cases, is extremely messy and hacky. It uses conio.h where it is available, carefully taking what's most likely to be there, and relies on platform-specific implementation details elsewhere. Its purpose is to provide pain relief for those who must bear with conio.h by facilitating cross-platform coding, making the library available where it isn't and implementing a few stray functions that may be missing from your local copy of conio.h because conio.h is non-standard, get over it. Its purpose is not to be a safe and complete terminal manipulation library! To these ends, it provides a firm, clean basis for which you know will compile on other platforms, has certain functions implemented, and has nothing else, no jumpscare macros to give you debugging nightmares, no weird symbol names, no nonsense.

Have fun.

How to use

The most obvious way would be to copy over conio.h and conio.cpp, and compile them within your project as if they were your own. I shan't bore you with specifics, but resources on how to structure and build your project should be abundant upon the Web.

I highly recommend against combining the two files for a single import. This loses the benefits of a secluded, sanitised environment the simple header file provides.

Alternatively, you could compile conio.cpp into a separate static or dynamic library, include conio.h in your source files then link the library after. If this option came to your mind, I'm sure I don't need to guide you through it.

Remember to qualify the name! Use either conio::foo, or just foo after using conio::foo. You can use using namespace conio if you want to forget about namespaces and use the library as a drop-in replacement for conio.h.

Implemented

getch
getche
kbhit
putch
ungetch
clrscr
clreol
wherex
wherey
gotoxy
textcolor
textbackground

Benefits

Using this library provides you with the following benefits (over using your stock conio.h):

Cross-platform All functions are implemented for UNIX-derivative systems as well.
Extensive Well not really, but at least it has clrscr...
Uniform You don't know what functions you get with stray conio.h implementations. This library takes the lowest common denominator and implements everything else.
Clean No unnecessary symbols, no hidden #defines. You know how bad those can screw over your debugging sessions.
Modern All functions are placed under the namespace conio, preventing name clashes.
Single-file All these benefits can be gained without installing or bundling massive codebases, by just copy-pasting two files!

How it works

As stated before, this library uses conio.h where it is available.

On 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, the following carries over from conio.h:

getch
getche
kbhit
putch
ungetch

These five functions were deemed safe to use because they exist in MinGW, with arguably the slimmest conio.h of them all.

The rest are implemented through the Windows Console API, windows.h.

On UNIX derivatives, this library makes extensive use of the General Terminal Interface and ANSI escape codes. Canonical mode and echo is turned off to emulate getch, and nonblock is also enabled for kbhit.

Pending implementations (TODOs)

Unified constants for colours and attributes

Known issues

Rapid consecutive calls to getch or kbhit can reveal input on UNIX systems, possibly because calls to tcgetattr are slow

(Un)license

All material in this repo is hereby released to the public domain, in the spirit of allowing you to use, hack or adapt the source code to fit your needs, as I have done to others before me, without worrying about crediting the author. You are free to use any written material within this repository, in part or in whole, for any purpose, without crediting me. See UNLICENSE for more details.

sy3c4ll / conio