Table of Contents
This section assumes at least basic familiarity with the command-line interpreter of a Unix, Windows or similar operating system.
Just as with most other command lines, spaces are used to separate command-line parameters to programs. If a string containing spaces needs to be passed as a single parameter, it should be enclosed with double quotes ("), for example:
javac "C:\Source Code\TestServlet.java" |
Not all commands result in an external process being spawned; the system shell supports "built-ins", which are handled by the Console plugin itself. Built-ins are prefixed with "%" to distinguish them from external commands.
Pressing Tab in the console's command input field will attempt to complete the filename or command before the caret. If there is more than one possible completion, they will be listed in the output area.
Each line of output produced by an external program is fed through several successive error patterns. Each error pattern attempts to match the line against a regular expression. If the line matches the regular expression, the file name, line number and error message is extracted from it; the line is then optionally matched against another regular expression to determine if it is a warning or error message.
If the error pattern specifies a filename of "$f", the current buffer's path is used; otherwise, the filename is resolved relative to the current directory.
It is also possible to specify an "extra" regular expression, against which lines subsequent to an error are checked and added to the error message if they match. This can be used to handle compilers which produce compiler errors and warnings that span several lines.
Parsed error and warning messages are shown in the Plugins>Error List>Error List window; this window is used to display errors from several other plugins as well.
The Console plugin includes error patterns that match errors produced by the following tools:
Generic errors matching the following format, produced by many tools, especially on Unix:
file:line:message |
Generic errors matching the so called "Emacs" format:
file:start line:end line:start column:end column:message |
The jikes Java compiler will produce errors in this form if given if the +E command-line option. Otherwise, it will output errors in a non-standard format which cannot be parsed by the Console plugin.
Errors output by the javac compiler found in Java 2 version 1.3 and later. Earlier versions are also supported, because they output errors in the generic format documented above.
Errors output by the javac compiler when it is being run from the Ant project build tool.
Microsoft Visual C++ and Microsoft .Net compiler errors.
Perl errors.
Errors output by the Jade and OpenJade document generation tools.
Error patterns can be customized in the Console>Error Patterns pane of the Global Options dialog box; you should familiarize yourself with regular expressions first, the syntax of which is documented in the jEdit user's guide.