[FR] use the Terminal as a console output

[farfromrefug]

I would really love to see the possibility to use a terminal as console output.
The reason is that we would benefit from all amazing features from xterm.js

Obviously one is colour output.

There are actually 2 ways to do that:

• give the possibility to run a command inside the Terminal while listening for stdout, stderr, close. Also this would allow stdin! Which would be amazing from for extensions!
• allow to "append" text to the console without it executing a command.

I can give more details on what i am trying to achieve if necessary

[egamma]

@farfromrefug the general desire is understood, but can you be more precise when you want to use the terminal as console output: when running tasks? when debugging a program?

[farfromrefug]

@egamma The idea came from my vscode extension. It's an extension to build Titanium Mobile projects (kind of like PhoneGap projects).

From the get i wanted to have a more interactive/beautiful console. I wanted a colorized console so that i could quickly and easily read the output.
So at first i used the "output colorizer" extension. It worked quite well but was really slow with long outputs, and it broke links to code (like test.js:23:2)

Now i know what xterm.js can do and i know it can fill all my requirements and even more:

• colors: well it would work right away, and i could even use the power of node utils to colorize even more
• links: this could be handled using the linkify addon of xterm.js. Even better, we could imagine an entry point for extensions to add new regexpfor links, and "override" the default "click" behavior.
• stdin: well this could be very useful for extensions running command line commands. As they could use the stdin of the terminal.

I know it would require quite some work on you side, but the benefit for extensions would be quite awesome! ;)

[egamma]

@farfromrefug VS Code has an integrated terminal and the terminal provides API to launch a process that runs in the terminal (extensions are already using this support).

We are planning to run VS Code tasks inside the terminal and for that we are investigating into enriching the terminal API further.

[siegebell]

This would be resolved if vscode had an API to launch a Node process in the terminal like how Language Servers are launched (i.e. using vscode's Node binaries).

[farfromrefug]

@egamma Yes there is an api for the terminal. But we can't do much with it, we miss big features:

• clear the terminal
• run command and "listen" for it like you would do with exec/spawn
• listen for stdin
• enable / disable addon (like linkify)
• add your own addon to xterm.js
• disable stdin (to create a console)

[Tyriar]

@farfromrefug good suggestions, could you split this issue out into individual API requests?

The listen ones are already captured here #13337, and we currently don't use any xterm.js addons, nor are they particularly polished upstream.

[Tyriar]

Thanks for creating the issues @farfromrefug, I'll close this off in favor of them now