How does Vim display :ls results (curses/cooked mode)

Question

When I am inside Vim, and i type ":ls", Vim lists the buffers. Most likely it is going into "cooked mode" using def_prog_mode() and endwin(). WHat I'd like to know how does it print the values now. The best i've come out with is using system("echo ....")which would be quite laborious. I've tried printf - no effect, and printw.

I need to do the same kind of thing in my apps, rather than create Windows or popups, I'd like to list internal information like Vim does.

Here's a sample of what I've tried. http://gist.github.com/587622 Compile it using:

gcc -o a.out -lncurses a.c && ./a.out

Answer 1

You probably just need to flush the stdio buffer using fflush. That is, after using printf to write some text, call fflush(stdout) to make sure the text gets sent to the terminal. ncurses is probably calling setbuf or setvbuf to enable block buffered IO to the terminal and this is not considered part of the tty modes saved and restored.