Feature Request: Find/search within the console output

[NHDaly]

Feature Request:

Related to: JunoLab/atom-julia-client#330

One of the only reasons I ever switch back to a terminal and the regular julia REPL is when i want to search through my REPL's terminal output. (As one example, when printing the @code_typed of a big function, and i want to find a specific function call within it, i find myself switching back to the terminal, opening Julia, and rerunning all the commands I need to get me back to that output.)

It'd be super great if the default Atom find-and-replace pane was able to search the contents of the Console! But if that's not possible, I guess having our own searchbox that opens on cmdf would also work.

[NHDaly]

I wasn't sure if this belongs here or in https://github.com/JunoLab/atom-julia-client. I would've guessed it belongs in the other repo, but the "New Issue" page says:

Please open your issue at https://github.com/JunoLab/Juno.jl/issues/new unless you've been explicitly pointed here by a Juno developer.

😁

[pfitzseb]

xterm.js has a addon for this here, but we'll still need to write our own UI for that. Re-using Atom's find-and-replace panel is probably not super easy.

I wasn't sure if this belongs here or in https://github.com/JunoLab/atom-julia-client. I would've guessed it belongs in the other repo

Yeah, I'd rather have all user issues/feature requests here so I don't lose track of them spread across 5 repos :)

[NHDaly]

Ah okay cool! So Xterm.js is the package we use to implement the terminal in the Console pane? Neat. I can look at that and see what i can do..

[NHDaly]

--- okay after some digging I see that Xterm.js is what's used in atom-ink to implement the terminal.

So basically we'd have to just expose xterm.js's search addon API through the UI in Ink? That seems reasonable!

Re-using Atom's find-and-replace panel is probably not super easy.

Bummer. I'll look into it a bit more; ideally we could hook them up so that pressing "find next" on the Atom find-and-replace panel would call the xterm search api. But yeah that's probably hard. Thanks sebastian! :)

[NHDaly]

Fwiw, here's how the the find-and-replace sets which Pane it's looking in when it does the searching:
https://github.com/atom/find-and-replace/blob/71a80c0b793423e7166fd26c2f39e932b9b5cd14/lib/find.coffee#L34

It calls observeActivePaneItem on the workspace to set up a callback where every time a Pane is activated, the Model in the find-and-replace package is updated to point to the newly activated Pane's TextEditor. (I don't really understand how the Pane is being converted into a TextEditor there, though...)

So, maybe we could hook into the find-and-replace package by creating a fake TextEditor -- a class that implements the TextEditor interface but calls xterm.js for its scan function -- and adding it to the Pane that contains the Console? :)

[NHDaly]

Cool! So i think the find-and-replace integration might not be too hard! :)

I have a first-pass rough implementation here: NHDaly/atom-ink@6c006fe

Next I'm going to look into the xterm.js search functionality you pointed out, and try to hook that up to the search API! :)

[NHDaly]

(The xterm.js search api is being refactored. We may want to wait until that is done. See discussion in xtermjs/xterm.js#1833)