I don’t know about you, but the DOS window that always accompanies Blender and before version 2.2.11 or so, the Gimp, has been a little irritating.
I don’t know much about the different versions and such of Gimp, so I don’t know exactly when they finally integrated the DOS window into Gimp, now labeled “Error Window” or something.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be naggy or anything, but I was just wondering if the Blender developers had plans to someday integrate the DOS window into Blender. I don’t know; it just has an unprofessional, incomplete feeling to having a relic from the past (the DOS window :D) pop up for every session. It also seems to be Blender’s week spot on Windows :D.
In addition to not crashing on OSX, the patch will need to preserve the old write to stdout functionality, henrymop. We need that for scripting, testing and renderfarms. Yeah, people actually use that stuff!
Personally, I think you all are a bunch of girly-men for being scared of a dosbox. But that is just MHO.
That’s not at all what he’s saying. He’s simply saying that the information displayed within the console/terminal window that appears will instead be showed in another window type inside blender. It’s got nothing to do with rendering or multi-tasking, it’s simply changing where Blender’s information/error content is puked into. Rather than being in a seperate window, it’s integrated into the main blender application window.
Exactly right in my opinion, though in slightly different words. Although technically it’s not a dosbox, or DOS window. It’s a terminal emulator window.
It’s a console, which is a system software device representing text entry and display. The Win32 console is (by default) configured to run the Win32 command shell: cmd.exe. DOS is dead; the command shell appears similar in many ways but provides full Win32 shell capabilities. Hence, the command shell (your “DOS” prompt) runs using the console, not the Win32 GUI, for I/O. [The terminal is the hardware: your screen, keyboard, mouse, etc. The terminal is accessible through the console, but a console need not be attached to any particular terminal.] Clear as mud, right?
It can’t bite you. [MAO agrees with stiv and Dittohead.]
If you really hate the console window showing up then just navigate to your Blender menu icon, right click, select the Shortcut tab or the Program tab (whichever one you see), select “Minimized” in the drop-down box next to “Run”, and check “Close on exit” if you see it. Henceforth, bliss.
Personally, I prefer having the console in a separate window. I clutter up my blender spaces enough as is. So I’m glad there will remain an option to keep it in the Windows version of Blender.
It’s hard to believe that a few years ago, I was one of those people that hated (and also somewhat ‘feared’) consoles. Ever since using Blender, I’ve found that they are a very useful thing. These days, my only complaints with consoles are that under windows:
they have such small buffer sizes that it’s impossible to get the full output of some programs without having to resort to stream redirection -> not too convienient, as it means that I have to find a place to put the file, run the program, then read the file.
when running a console-mode program not from the command-line (i.e. double-clicking on the program, or double-clicking on a file that opens such a program), if it exits quickly and doesn’t write it’s output to any log file, it gets rather frustrating. This is especially a problem if the commands that you would have to invoke instead are very long-winded beasts.
Well for anyone who learnt to use a computer only seeing only nice flashy GUI’s, consoles can seem backwards, and also intimidating. Perhaps that is Microsoft’s fault, as consoles on windows that pop up, always disappear before you can read what they said. I guess this is to avoid problems of having heaps of console windows hanging around. The colour scheme, although it dates back to the early days of computing, is also another factor. As far as I have seen, on Linux the consoles can be colourful (under some desktop environments) right??
Heh, what you all are asking for is possible, but I don’t think ghost is prepared to handle it… That said, if the coders are giving special attention to Win32 then it could get in there.
For Alltaken’s concern:
The SetConsoleCtrlHandler() Win32 API function must be called to register a handler for the CTRL+CLOSE console signal. Once trapped, the choice can be given to quit Blender or just hide the console, if desired, or just hide the console without asking, etc.
And for Robin’s:
To hide/show the window on both the desktop and the taskbar, the Blender GUI needs to know the HWND handle of the console window. If it needs to find out:
h = FindWindow( class_name, window_name );
where class_name and window_name are far pointers to ASCIIZ strings. Then call:
ShowWindow( h, SW_HIDE );
or:
ShowWindow( h, SW_SHOW );
And for Aligorith:
Find your Blender shortcut icon, right click, select the Options tab, and set your Buffer Size to something huge (1000~2000) and set your Number of buffers to one.
The console does appear to confuse a lot of people… Perhaps it should by default open hidden when Blender starts. Then be ‘make visible’-able from the Info menu bar (main menu at the top). But give users like me the option to make Blender start with the console window open via a Ctrl+U -able preference…
