onDidWriteData, PseudoTerminal and Tasks

[FlavienBusseuil]

I wrote a VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=flavienbusseuil.terminus) based on the feature onDidWriteData that has been deprecated in 1.39.

My extension is about reading terminal output (mostly for Tasks) and watch for particular regex.

The new PseudoTerminal API support a similar feature but can only be used on terminals created by the extension itself.

I think I understand the reason of this choice... giving the control over existing terminals may lead to security issues. (even if I found odd that sendText is still available on legacy terminals)

Regarding this consideration, I feel like my extension is broken forever... but I still have needs for it. Maybe there is another path for it?
I was thinking of re-doing my own Task launcher to have control over terminals through Pseudo Terminal... but sounds overkill.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• How could I create an interactive terminal (#82329)

[Tyriar]

So window.onDidWriteTerminalData is equivalent to Terminal.onDidWriteData but the plan is not to stabilize it for perf/security reasons. Though I'm not sure why your extension is published at all since proposed APIs aren't allowed to be published to the marketplace?

Task problem matchers seem to mostly cover what you're trying to do? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/tasks#_processing-task-output-with-problem-matchers

Other things of note:

• Exit code reporting should be added soon Terminal: add a way of getting the exit code #62103
• "Terminus" is the name of a terminal: https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus

[FlavienBusseuil]

Weird... Terminal.onDidWriteData was available without Insiders and publishable on the marketplace (I never paid attention that it was a "proposed API" 😱).

Problem matchers would have been just perfect but as I deal with unformatted output (legacy code), that is really not referring to any piece of code or a file. In fact I'm not always looking for "problems" in the output neither.

I guess I will have to reconsider the tooling I'm using right now. Thanks for your time and your relevant points 👍

[Tyriar]

@alexr00 might be able to give more guidance with tasks and problem matchers, but they match on regex and then expose problems, plus they're part of the built-in diagnostics system.

[alexr00]

Problem matchers can also provide warnings and info, but they all end up in the "Problems" pane.
This issue tracks programmatic parsing of task output: #59337
If you need to do something "special" (not just create problems) with your task output, then you could take a look at the CustomExecution API (example: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/blob/master/task-provider-sample/src/customTaskProvider.ts). No docs for it yet, but I'll be writing some soon.

[FlavienBusseuil]

Hey that's cool! I think CustomExecution API would do the job for me! 🎉

Thanks @alexr00 and @Tyriar !

[alexr00]

I suspect that CustomExecution probably gives you more freedom than you need and that if we had #59337 then that would be more suited to what you need and mean less work for you. If you're interested, I recommend subscribing to #59337 so if I add API just for that then you can use it/provide feedback.

[FlavienBusseuil]

Awesome, thanks for all your assistance. 👍
I subscribed to #59337 and would love give it a try when available!