Console Tab

The Console tab displays all console output, text your program sends to System.out and System.err, in a scrollable text view so that you can review the messages printed here. Input sent to your program will also be echoed to the Console. Breakpoints for the current debug session that have their log action enabled will send their log expression to the Console. Any error messages such as warning about conditional expressions that cannot be evaluate will also be displayed here.

Once a debugging session ends, the console output will remain in the text view until you manually clear its contents or close this debugging session.

The text from various sources are displayed in different colors so that you can easily distinguish whether a line of text is text sent to System.out or System.err, whether a line of text is the result of a breakpoint log expression, and so on. The colors used can be customizable in Tools | Options | Color category.

In order to prevent the Console from using too much memory, the Console has a limit on the number of lines of text it is to store in its buffer. Once the number of lines reaches this buffer size, earlier lines will be removed from the Console display. To configure the size of this buffer, enter the new buffer size in Tools | Options | Debug category.

The console can be configured to word wrap its contents to the size of the Console tab. This is convenient if you have limited display space for the Console contents and do not wish to have to constantly scroll horizontally to view the text output. To enable or disable console word wrapping, please see Tools | Options | Debug category.

Some platforms may have difficulty display Console output in a timely fashion, especially if your platform does not support timesliced multi-tasking. BugSeeker provides an option for you to specify the Console display priority (Tools | Options | Debug category). There are three priority levels that you can choose from: low, normal, and high. The results of these various settings vary from platform to platform so it's best that you experiment with these values until you achieve the desired effect.

If you are remote debugging, all console output from the program being debugged remotely will be displayed in the console that program was started from; program's console output is not also sent to the Console tab.

Console Input

BugSeeker support debugging console programs that accept console input. At the bottom of the Console tab is a text field where you will be able to send text input to the console program you are currently debugging from within BugSeeker. This Console input text field is enabled only when the current debugging session is running.

If you are debugging remotely you should not use this text field to send console input to the remote process but rather enter console input in the separate console that you use to start your remote process.

Warning: do not send console input to running programs that are not excepting input to be sent to it because the running program will hang if too much input is sent to it.

Save to file

You can save the contents of the console to disk as long as the debuggee is suspended or has been terminated. Right-click anywhere within the console tab and select Save To File from the popup menu and you will be prompted for a save location.

Clearing console contents

To manually clear the console (only when the debuggee is not running), right-click the console pane and select Clear.