mike-ward/VSColorOutput

Would be nice to count occurences of certain substring and output a digest

Opened this issue · 2 comments

@mike-ward This is to inquire if you would agree to merge such functionality into your plugin code. IMO I can craft all the necessary changes myself.

The scenario is the following: we have a build where sometimes "curious" stuff is being output or we have a debug run where a program outputs some "curious" stuff into debug output window. The "curious" stuff is such that it can be detected with a regex so the plugin can color it already. The problem is one has to scroll through the entire output to check if there's something "curious". So it'd be nice if at the end of build or debug the output pane would have a digest such as "Warning! Curious stuff found XYZ times!!!".

Here's how I would do this. I'd add a couple more "categories" such as "debug error" and "debug warning". I'd also add a new setting for every category - "how to count and build a digest on this". The setting would have three options - "don't count and output a digest" (as it works now), "count and output a digest if at least one ocurrence is found" and "count and output a digest no matter how many ocurrences were found".

That sounds like a neat idea. I've had others ask if I could filter out the "cruf" in the output window so they could see just the stuff they're interested in. However, the VS internal model does not allow removing lines from the output window.

This certainly is a step in the right direction in that it lets you know if something you're interested in has occurred.

Seems like you have a good understanding of how the code works and how it hooks into VS's category classification system, so yeah, I'm up for a pull request.

I would definitely like to see a count of compiler warnings at the end of the build output, which this issue should make possible.
I'll try to contribute when I can find the time, but no guarantees.