Where can I find documentation of the 'keypress' event in Node.js

Question

In Node.js, we can configure the 'readline' module to emit 'keypress' events like this:

const readline = require('readline');

readline.emitKeypressEvents(process.stdin);

if (process.stdin.isTTY) {
  process.stdin.setRawMode(true);
}

Then, we can listen to keypress events like this (example listens to Ctrl+c ):

process.stdin.on('keypress', (str, key) => {
  if (key.ctrl && key.name === 'c') {
    // do stuff
  }
});

This works very well, but I can't find any documentation about the 'keypress' event at https://nodejs.org/en/docs/.

So my question is: where is the documentation about the arguments used when my 'keypress'-callback is called?

Answer 1

This detail is specified here because:

The process.stdin is a duplex stream and calling emitKeypressEvents(<IN/OUT>) will cause that readline module will read from the process.stdin then it will parse the data and then will emit the event writing to the output stream calling write, because of this the docs you are looking for are written on that function.

emitKeypressEvents set the same input param as input and output, instead in createInterface you can define one for input and one for output (where you must attach the on(keypress) event.

A little playground to understand:

const readline = require('readline');
const { Readable } = require('stream');

const inStream = new Readable({
  read() { console.log('in reading'); }
});

let i = 0
setInterval(() => { inStream.push(`${i++}`) }, 1000)
readline.emitKeypressEvents(inStream);

inStream.on('keypress', (...ar) => {
  console.log(ar)
});

Answer 2

It's not directly documented, but the readline.emitKeypressEvents() method causes the given Readable stream to begin emitting keypress events corresponding to received input:

• https://nodejs.org/api/readline.html#readline_readline_emitkeypressevents_stream_interface
• https://nodejs.org/api/process.html#process_process_stdin