Testing terminal programs within emacs (or other IDEs)

[LanX]

Hi

does someone have a clever idea how to interactivly run the currently edited program within a terminal emulation without loosing potential error output?

Especially Term::ReadLine is unusable within compilation-mode, which opens a new pane showing the interaction with the program.

Compilation mode has no terminal emulation (AFAIK), which means potential errors and output is displayed but input doesn't get to the process.

3 ideas come to mind:

1. augment compilation mode to incorparate term-mode?
2. Term::ReadLine allows defining explicit IN and OUT handles which may be redirected to a separate xterm window?
3. like 2., but redirect output to a new splitted pane within emacs

Curious for input, especially for insights if and how other IDEs solve this.

glossary:

I use "pane" for a sub-window within the main window, i.e. what emacs calls a "window" and mozilla calls a "frame"

update

for what it's worth, it's possible to run a term script with "M-x term path-to-script" within emacs. This would not only need another keybinding but any special handling of error messages is lost than.

[LanX]

> Term::ReadLine allows defining explicit IN and OUT handles which may be redirected to a separate xterm window?

tried this but wasn't sufficiently reliable, (but this couldhave been be caused by gnome-terminal weirdness)

The following hack works with xterm , put it at the very beginning of your program.

It restarts the program within a separate xterm-window but redirects STDERR to the parent process.

This allows running a terminal script from within emacs and should be easily adapted to other environments using l/unix.

All STDERR warnings show within emacs and are clickable to navigate to source file/line.

my $ptty=$ARGV[0];
if ($ENV{INSIDE_EMACS}) {
    my $tty=`tty`;
    delete $ENV{INSIDE_EMACS};
    warn "restart in xterm $0 $tty\n";
    my $x=`xterm -e '/usr/bin/perl $0 $tty'`;
    warn "xterm closed\n";
    exit;
} elsif ($ptty) {
    close STDERR;
    open STDERR,">",$ptty;
    local $\="\n";
    warn "redirecting STDERR to $ptty\n";
    $|=1;
}

This approach can also be used by the perldebugger when debugging another Term::ReadLine application

When sufficiently tested this logic can be put into a separate module RunXTerm , no adjustments of editor needed.

disclaimer

It's a proof of concept hack!!!

I'm not overly familiar with tty and forking and open for cleaner suggestions. :)

[wrog]

run your program from M-x shell ?

[LanX]

Thanks, but what's the advantage over "M-x term" ?

Both solutions lack the possibility to activate the error lines like compile-mode does and other features...

[LanX]

emacs related

> Both solutions lack the possibility to activate the error lines like compile-mode does and other features...

well this can be somehow solved by calling M-x compilation-minor-mode afetr the terminal has exited.

Unfortunately I can't find a hook in term-mode to activate this minor-mode automatically after the terminal has exited.

general question

But this evolves too much around emacs now ... I think I should have asked the question differently emphasizing on filehandles and terminals to not only attract emacs folks:

How do I run a perl application with TWO attached terminals, such that only STDERR goes to the second one?