piping content to script incompatible with blessed

[udondan]

I am trying to pipe content to my script

echo "foo" | ui

Which gives me this error, when I init blessed:

/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/program.js:241
    throw new Error('Not a terminal.');
          ^
Error: Not a terminal.
    at Program.listen (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/program.js:241:11)
    at new Program (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/program.js:89:8)
    at Program (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/program.js:28:12)
    at new Screen (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:256:20)
    at Function.Screen (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:245:12)
    at init (/path/includes/uilib.js:17:25)
    at initUI (/path/bin/ui:25:6)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/path/bin/ui:388:1)
    at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)

And that makes sense, because I use the same condition to actually check if the user piped something to my script.

I tried to disable this check in program.js which brings up these lines:

TypeError: Object #<Socket> has no method 'setRawMode'
    at Program.fn (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/program.js:288:20)
    at Program.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:117:20)
    at Program.EventEmitter.addListener (events.js:138:10)
    at Screen._listenMouse (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:440:16)
    at ScrollableBox.fn (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:1808:19)
    at ScrollableBox.EventEmitter._emit (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/events.js:86:20)
    at ScrollableBox.EventEmitter.addListener (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/events.js:25:8)
    at Screen.setEffects (/path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:1602:7)
    at /path/node_modules/blessed/lib/widget.js:1849:17
    at Array.forEach (native)

Removing that line as well, lets my script run w/o errors, but blessed is not able to catch any keystrokes or mouseactions correctly. Instead it shows some controll characters on top of my UI

^[[M#?=^[[M }8^[[MC}8^[[M#}8^[[Ma?B^[[Ma?B^[[Ma?B^[[Ma?B^[[M`?B^[[M`?Bafc

I have no clue about TTYs. Is this something that can be done or is there no chance getting content from pipe and then open up an interactive UI where the user can actually interact with the content he just piped? I guess (hope!) it is possible since all user actions are actually catched but simply not interpreted correctly.

[dbkaplun]

👍 I can confirm this issue.

[AdrianSchneider]

After struggling with the same problem for a little while, I've gotten this working over at jsonfui --

If you pipe in content, the stdin stream is dedicated to that input. That can't change. Instead, you want to tell blessed to read from the active terminal (/dev/tty) instead of standard input (/dev/stdin).

Blessed supports this by accepting an input option on screen. While it defaults to process.stdin, you can pass in a reference to the terminal input instead.

I found the ttys module wraps this behaviour quite nicely if you want to be able to have the same code for either case (stdin or dev/ttyl if stdin is not a tty).

Cheers

[chjj]

@AdrianSchneider, blessed no longer throws an error when input/output isn't a TTY. Try the latest version.