Process console

Process console is a window which purpose is to display output of debugged process and transfer input to it. The console shares the engine with Remote terminal window, therefore it can be used for programs which perform advanced terminal interaction (e.g. ncurses user interface).

Using the console

In order to open the process console, choose Show process console option from WinGDB main menu during debugging.

You can also use additional features accessible from the toolbar or context menu (click right mouse button over the window to show it). These options are:

Refresh window: redraws window contents, which is useful after you change appearance settings in Preferences.
Copy: allows to copy a fragment of the screen to the clipboard. Hold left mouse button and move the mouse to mark selected fragment, then use Copy to copy marked text. You can then paste it in any application accepting text.
Copy screen: similar to Copy, but copies entire visible contents.
Paste to input stream: allows to paste previously copied text to the terminal input stream. It will behave as if you typed the characters. You can easily paste e.g. pre-edited shell commands. If you want the command to execute immediately, include the line break when copying. If you would like to edit the command before executing, do not include line break, and the terminal will insert the text without triggering execution (which is caused by a newline character present in pasted text).
Toggle capture: allows to record text printed to the terminal by remote program to the capture file stored locally (in Temp directory). The output is written "as-is", without control sequence conversion.
Save captured output to file: saves the output recorded so far to specified local file.
Make document from captured output: opens the output recorded so far in new Visual Studio document window. Here you can search it, print, edit or make any operation possible to do on a document.
Clear capture buffer: clears the temporary capture file.
Local echo: when enabled, the console automatically echoes typed characters. It may be desirable for some applications which don't echo characters on the application side (e.g. performing a simple text read from standard input). More sophisticated applications, like Linux shells or curses/slang programs, do not need such echoing. You can enable or disable the echo feature just by clicking this button.
Scroll down and Scroll up: used with scrollback buffer described below.
Show console preferences: shows the Preferences window with console window settings.

Configuring the console appearance

You can configure font used in console windows as well as colors. These settings are separate from Remote terminal settings, you can have different look for terminals and consoles.

To open configuration dialog, either use Show console preferences option on console window itself, or Preferences option from WinGDB main menu. In second case, choose Console category from the list on the left. Caution: both will change settings for all console windows, there is no per-window configuration.

Using the scrollback buffer

The process console in WinGDB emulates fixed-size text console window, as this is what typical Un*x program expects. Being fixed size, there is no direct possibility to scroll the window upwards, in order to see old lines of text that already have been moved out of the window. Typical console emulators address this problem by providing a scrollback buffer. This is an area of additional lines, logically placed above the console area. When the console encounters a newline character requiring it to scroll its entire contents upwards, the topmost line is stored in the scrollback buffer, instead of being discarded. This way you can have both fixed-size terminal emulation, and a possibility to examine lines of text printed earlier.

In order to use the scrollback buffer in the process console, do one of the following:

Click one of the Scroll down or Scroll up buttons on the toolbar.
Turn your mouse wheel.

The contents of the window will scroll, showing lines of text printed earlier (or blank space if there were no text yet).

Note that the scrollbars placed next to the window do not engage the scrollback buffer. They are for different purpose -- when the window is resized to be smaller than emulated fixed-size console, you can use the scrollbars to view different parts of it.

WinGDB by default allocates 1000 additional lines. The limit is necessary to avoid exhausting memory when debugged process prints large amounts of data over prolonged time. You can change this amount in WinGDB Preferences, on the Console page. It may require restarting of Visual Studio to take effect, as the IDE "caches" its windows and their state.

Using UTF-8 and displaying non-Latin characters (incl. CJK)

The console supports UTF-8 encoding for Unicode characters. Since WinGDB 3.6, non-monospace Unicode fonts are also supported. This is for the purpose of displaying non-Latin characters (esp. CJK). For the usual, plain ASCII output, just use the default font.

In order to display CJK characters properly, you will need to install appropriate font and configure it in WinGDB. We recommend a font called Unifont, which is available under the GPL license and you can freely download it from:

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

It contains all the glyphs from the CJK character set, and most other scripts as well. You can also use some CJK font that you already have on your computer, but correct result is not guaranteed (as we tested the console only with Unifont). After downloading the font, install it in your Windows system (by double-clicking the file and then clicking Install button in the font viewer). When the font is installed, go to WinGDB / Preferences, choose Console page, then click on the arrow next to Console font field, choose Browse, and find the Unifont on the list. The font is not much scalable, however standard 14 point size should be fine. When selected, the font description in the Preferences window should look similar to this (14 points is equivalent to 19 pixels, hence number 19):

Sample output from the Process Console using Unifont 14 is shown below. Note that the console still uses monospace rendering, although the character width varies. This is necessary to emulate console or terminal correctly. The console uses a heuristics to figure out optimal character cell size. For CJK characters it should look just fine. For narrower characters, extra spacing will be visible.

Limitations

There are several aspects in which the console window could be improved. Currently those are given lower priority. If you find particular change important or critical, please contact us.

Implementing screen size changing. Currently it is fixed to 80x25, although underlying terminal engine supports screens of variable size.
Improving xterm compatibility.
Displaying the console without active debugging session.