[Tutor] Output not legible when debugging with ipdb

[eryksun]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Walter Prins <wprins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> honest.  Regarding Powershell (vs for example cmd.exe): The (slightly)
> perplexing/irritating/annoying thing is that the older cmd.exe shell, which
> uses a standard old-school NT console window, does support ANSI escape
> sequences (but is otherwise pretty braindead IMHO, for example does not
> support arbitrary resizing, copy and paste is clunky and so on), while the
> text mode/console window hosting Powershell behaves somewhat differently,
> and is (IIRC) at least resizable, but apparently doesn't support escape
> sequences, so there appears to be some differences -- though I realize these
> must be due to features in the shells themselves since they share some
> common console window functionality.

The cmd shell's built-in "type" and "echo" commands don't parse escape
sequences. I think "color" is the only command that sets character
attributes, and only for the entire screen buffer (e.g. "color 0D"
sets light purple text on a black background).

Adding escape-sequence support to existing programs such as cmd.exe
has to be done in the console itself or by hacking the console API.
ConEmu manages a hidden console window and does all of its own
display. There's also ANSICON, which injects a DLL (ansi32.dll or
ansi64.dll) into the process. My guess is that the DLL hooks kernel32
WriteConsole to look for escape sequences and then scripts the console
API. However it works, it's very simple to use:

ANSICON
https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon

Console API
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682073

I agree the Windows console is braindead. It was fine for its day in
NT 3 and 4 back in the 90s, but it hasn't improved much in 20 years,
and I doubt it ever will. Maybe with PowerShell you're thinking of the
Integrated Scripting Environment:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd819514

For IPython, try the Qt console:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/interactive/qtconsole.html