Shai Mishali asks, “Is there something like readLine that lets me read stdin as the user types instead of waiting for an entire line?” The readLine function waits until the user presses enter or otherwise recognizes EOF to process input.

A little web search led me to this SO post, which is  based on this example, using termios, the Unix API for terminal I/O. After looking through both posts, I built a RawMode type to support direct input based on that code because nothing makes me happier than messing with solutions to make them a little swiftier.

To use this, you fetch bytes until you catch an EOF. It’s interesting to test both direct keyboard entries as well as pasting complex emojis. As I was working on this on both 10.14 and 10.15, I was mildly startled when my initial test code stopped working when I moved to 10.14. UnicodeScalar does not offer a utf8 view until 10.15:

extension Unicode.Scalar {
  @available(macOS 10.15, iOS 13, tvOS 13, watchOS 6, *)
  @frozen
  public struct UTF8View {
    @inlinable
    internal init(value: Unicode.Scalar) {
      self.value = value
    }
    @usableFromInline
    internal var value: Unicode.Scalar
  }

  @available(macOS 10.15, iOS 13, tvOS 13, watchOS 6, *)
  @inlinable
  public var utf8: UTF8View { return UTF8View(value: self) }
}

So thank you, Swift team, for giving us that. It’s a nice addition to the language!

Anyway, if you have a different approach or you can see ways to improve my take further, drop a comment and let me know.