Events #

PHP TUI ships with a library called php-term which takes care of writing and reading from the terminal.

Sooner or later you will need to read events from the terminal:

• Keyboard events
• Mouse events

To access these events you need access to the PHP-Term Terminal object.

Accessing the terminal #

PHP-TUI uses the conecpt of a backend. The backend is an abstraction for writing to the terminal and by default it will create a php-term backend.

In order to use php-term you will need to create it yourself:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use PhpTui\Term\Terminal;
use PhpTui\Tui\Bridge\PhpTerm\PhpTermBackend;
use PhpTui\Tui\DisplayBuilder;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$terminal = Terminal::new();
$display = DisplayBuilder::default(PhpTermBackend::new($terminal))->build();

Technically it’s fine to NOT create a new backend using the same terminal instance.

Accessing Events #

Now that you have the terminal you can use it to access events:

while (null !== $event = $this->terminal->events()->next()) {
    if ($event instanceof CharKeyEvent) {
        if ($event->char === 'q') {
           // do something
        }
    }
    if ($event instanceof CodedKeyEvent) {
        if ($event->code === KeyCode::Esc) {
           // do something
        }
    }
}

There are several classes of event:

• CharKeyEvent: a character key was pressed.
• CodedKeyEvent: a non-character key was pressed (e.g. escape, up, down, tab, etc).
• CursorPositionEvent: after issuing Actions::requestCursorPosition() the terminal should return this event.
• FunctionKeyEvent: Function key was pressed
• MouseEvent: When mouse capture is enabled, these events provide the mouse position and button status.