Java is too limited when dealing with the Console (original) (raw)

Remi Forax forax at univ-mlv.fr
Tue Nov 15 21:35:27 UTC 2016

Hi Brunoais, Java is not and will never be only what comes with the OpenJDK, it's a big (really big) community full of libraries for whatever you wish and even sometimes what you don't wish.

So beside readline, you can also take a look at Jansi https://github.com/fusesource/jansi it's the package used by maven for its colored outputs.

Btw you can put a dll inside a jmod.

regards, Rémi

----- Mail original -----

De: "Roger Riggs" <Roger.Riggs at Oracle.com> À: core-libs-dev at openjdk.java.net Envoyé: Mardi 15 Novembre 2016 19:17:34 Objet: Re: Java is too limited when dealing with the Console

Hi Brunoais,

Largely, because most people don't interact with java from a terminal and the simple stream oriented access has been sufficient. Take a look for layered libraries that can handle fancier terminals that have color and various positioning (ANSI) escape sequences that might meet your needs. Roger

On 11/15/2016 1:09 PM, Brunoais wrote: jLine requires a .dll on windows making it not OS agnostic. If this existed in java itself, this problem would not be a problem because java internal dll are signed by java and can be included without issues.

But then, why doesn't java have this?

On 15/11/2016 15:12, Roger Riggs wrote: Hi, You might find an open source package like JLine would have the full featured terminal support you are looking for. http://jline.sourceforge.net/ Roger

On 11/13/2016 5:35 AM, Brunoais wrote: Since java 6, a class named Console was created. This class allows reading and writing directly to the console, including getting input without echoing for password purposes. Unfortunately, that class does not include useful functionality for java programs to work on the console and output formatted text. The feature I miss the most is knowing how many columns I have to type into in order to deliver an easier to read formatted output while avoiding line wraps that are not coded in. There are other things I miss like having multi-line progress bars (so far I can do single line if it is the last line by using "\r" and re-writing the line). Other times, it is more user friendly to wait for any key press instead of specifically waiting for "Enter" which will also add more lines to the console. I did some search and found nothing about this. Why hasn't this been implemented for java code?

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