UNIX curses: some clarifications on what is done during teco_interface_init_screen()

User messages printed in interative mode aren't currently fully preserved on stdout/stderr
since they are redirected to /dev/null.
Only messages that are not flushed out will be preserved.
Unless you redirect stdout/stderr of SciTECO of course since in this case no redirection
is necessary.

This is probably tolerable esp. once we support multi-line messages in the UIs.
At least it would be tricky to work around.

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/interface-curses/interface.c b/src/interface-curses/interface.c
index 381c188..b135c5c 100644
--- a/src/interface-curses/interface.c
+++ b/src/interface-curses/interface.c
@@ -597,6 +597,14 @@ teco_interface_init_screen(void)
 	 * redirect it. Otherwise, they are already redirected
 	 * (e.g. to a file) and writing to them does not
 	 * interrupt terminal interaction.
+	 *
+	 * This cannot of course preserve all messages written to stdout/stderr.
+	 * Only those messages written before flushing will be preserved and
+	 * be visible after program termination since they are still in a user-
+	 * space stdio-buffer.
+	 * All messages could only be preserved if we redirected to a temporary
+	 * file and replayed it afterwards. It wouldn't preserve the order of
+	 * stdout vs. stderr messages.
 	 */
 	if (isatty(1)) {
 		teco_interface.stdout_orig = dup(1);