Glynn Clements
David Roundy wrote:
On my terminal (aterm), calling
hSetBuffering stdin NoBuffering
within my program messes up the terminal settings somehow [...]
Disabling buffering with hSetBuffering not only disables the user-space buffering (analogous to setvbuf() etc in C), it also disables the terminal's buffering (more precisely, disables canonical mode).
According to me, hSetBuffering should not touch the terminal settings ever. It is not mentioned in the Report and it is not implied by its name. It only leads to confusion.
BTW, if your program actually needs unbuffered terminal input (i.e. you want to receive individual key codes without waiting for the user to hit Return), and hSetBuffering didn't change the terminal settings, you would have to do it yourself anyhow, leading to the same issues.
In my experience, one seldom wants to do this. There are specialised libraries which do things like this well and easily. Each time I wanted unbuffered input terminal was used for testing only, in which case backspace is useful. For stupid little programs we could provide some stupid little functions which have the word 'Magic' in their name, instead of abusing standard operations. Strictly in my opinion, Feri.