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Handle `cerr` in terminal pager

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#49 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli

Research direction

The issue does not identify files, tests, or a specific entry point. Start by locating the terminal pager implementation and reading the discussion from #46, then establish which strategy for handling cerr the project accepts. Done means cerr is handled according to that decision without blocking the pager work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Need to handle cerr as well as cout in terminal pager. Discussion from #46:

Ian:
We do need a strategy for what to do with cerr, but I don't know what is best yet.

Currently cerr will be written to the normal terminal buffer, so it won't be seen whilst the alternative buffer is being used but it reappears when the alternative buffer is disabled. This is perhaps not a good solution, but I don't think it is too bad for a first implementation. Some other options:

  1. Capture it and sent it to the same place as cout, it will appear in the output flow in the alternative buffer. We'd probably need to colour it to make is easily visible as it could be anywhere.
  2. Capture it and display it at the bottom of the alternative buffer for better visibility, but then there might be quite a lot of information displayed.
  3. Capture it and if anything at all is written to it we could avoid using the pager at all, just display the errors in the normal terminal flow.

Johan:
I have a preference for option 1, but I think we can discuss it in a dedicated issue and solve it in a dedicated PR so that it does not block this one, WDYT?

Dominant language
C++
Stars
6
Forks
5
Avg merge
4h 22m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

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