Read a character from standard input in Go (without pressing Enter)

go-termbox is very heavyweight. It wants to take over the entire terminal window. For example, it clears the screen on startup, which may not be what you want.

I put this together on OSX. Just a tiny getchar():

https://github.com/paulrademacher/climenu/blob/master/getchar.go

termbox-go is a light-weight Go-native package which offers some rudimentary terminal control. Including the ability to get input in raw mode (read one character at a time without the default line-buffered behaviour).

It also has fairly ok compatibility across different systems.

And keyboard extends termbox-go to give some additional keyboard functionality like multi-key shortcuts and sequences.

This is a minimal working example for those running a UNIX system:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"
    "os/exec"
)

func main() {
    // disable input buffering
    exec.Command("stty", "-F", "/dev/tty", "cbreak", "min", "1").Run()
    // do not display entered characters on the screen
    exec.Command("stty", "-F", "/dev/tty", "-echo").Run()

    var b []byte = make([]byte, 1)
    for {
        os.Stdin.Read(b)
        fmt.Println("I got the byte", b, "("+string(b)+")")
    }
}

You could use this library (mine): https://github.com/eiannone/keyboard

This is an example for getting a single keystroke:

char, _, err := keyboard.GetSingleKey()
if (err != nil) {
    panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("You pressed: %q\r\n", char)