Working with this small terminal

Ok, I played with computercraft a while back the last time I binged on Minecraft, so it's been a while. I remember way back when I used top lay with it you could resize this extremely small and limited terminal to something more practical.. However the ability to do that seems to have gone away. I vaguely remember this happening toward the end of the last time I played with it and it being one of the things that drove me to no ends of frustration. Well it's happening again lol.

This extremely small terminal size is just unusable. I can't even get a list of methods reliably because it just scrolls off the screen. Surely there is some work arounds or better methods for dealing with this? I'm trying to figure out what information is usable from something in openccsensors but only being able to see the last 18 lines of the output prevents me from being able to do this.

Is there any way on the server side configuration to change the terminal size for everyone? In searching I found some mention that the server side was the reason for the problem because it had to be the same size for everyone. There are only a few people playing on my server so it wouldn't be difficult to find a usable size that works for everyone if it's changeable server side.

Thanks for any help.

moar peripherals adds a 'blue tooth' keyboard
you can then use a monitor instead of the small screen

You could change the term size in the config, if you are using a version before 1.6, however this is no longer the case (because pocket computers were added).

The print command will auto-wrap what you give it, if it's still too long you can save the output to a file or redirect to a monitor. MoarP adds a keyboard which allows key input with no interface, created for use with a large monitor.

I don't think the terminal size is unusable, I think of it as another limitation. It's amazing what games people have created with the small size.

Indeed, after pairing the keyboard you can then eg create a startup script along the lines of "monitor top shell" to streamline the process.

What you can't do is change the terminal size of a system's inbuilt display, at least, not using CC 1.6 or later. That option is simply gone.

hmm, joy yet another mod to have to add to make something usable lol. I love ComputerCraft in concept, but some of the design decisions like this small non re-sizable terminal is annoying. I won't edit programs in game because of it, I use VIM directly on the server.

Is there anyway to redirect all stdout output to a file? I tried using > like I would in linux with no luck. The specific problem I'm having right now is trying to use OpenCCPeripherals and get details about the applied energistics storage unit sitting next to the computer. The peripheral.wrap("").getTargetDetails("") output however is way to long for me to see all the information available on it. Someone mentioned redirecting the print output but not sure if there is a way to do this output through print.. I haven't looked into it that far yet.

EDIT:
So loaded up this MoarPeripherals mod and tried out the keyboard. Besides it being kind of annoying itself initially (granted I haven't looked into it much beyond getting it working), it still isn't enough lol. A 4x4 monitor with text scale set to .5 still doesn't display all the data…

I've got to find some way to either output this to a file or be able to have a linux " | less" equivalent or something….

As for the annoyances of this keyboard, like I said I haven't looked into it much but having to position the keyboard in just the right spot so that you can right click it while looking at the monitor … meh.

steven6282, on 30 March 2015 - 02:53 AM said:

…having to position the keyboard in just the right spot so that you can right click it while looking at the monitor … meh.

Are you using the latest version of MoarP? After right clicking the keyboard you *should* have a couple of seconds to adjust your view before you're locked in.

Dog, on 30 March 2015 - 03:36 AM said:

steven6282, on 30 March 2015 - 02:53 AM said:

…having to position the keyboard in just the right spot so that you can right click it while looking at the monitor … meh.

Are you using the latest version of MoarP? After right clicking the keyboard you *should* have a couple of seconds to adjust your view before you're locked in.

Not the very latest version no. I'm running FTB Infinity 1.7 mod pack with some customized mods. It has CC 1.6.5, so I'm using the version of MoarP for CC 1.6.5. The latest version says it's for CC 1.7

It doesn't matter though, the solution doesn't work for me. I tried a 10 x 5 monitor and I still can't see all of the output. Like I said before, I've got to either find some way to redirect this to a file or find something equivalent to the linux less command so that I can scroll up and down through output.

Lol, finally got the output I was looking for by realizing how the sensor coordinates work… and *sigh*, looks like it doesn't even do what I wanted. I was trying to find a way to have a monitor display a simple free types and free space remaining on my storage array. But it doesn't look like OpenCC will give me that information on any of the AE items I can find and getTargetDetails on. I found one youtube video from 2013 on it showing it getting the information from the ME Wireless Access point, but I can only assume he is using AE1, or OpenCC has downgraded it's features since then because my wireless access point doesn't show anything beyond it's own inventory.

Searching for ComputerCraft Applied Energistics brings back so little recent relevant data. A lot of the old mods that helped with this have been discontinued. Last time I played I had to get the source to and customize an outdated mod to get interaction with my AE system, that mod is so out of date now I'm not even going to bother trying with it. So I guess I'll probably start a new thread if I don't find anything soon to see if anyone else has a currently working solution for this. Wish the AE developer would just code in CC support directly but I found one ticket on their system where the developer pretty much says he's not really interested in it and people can write a mod for it lol.

But back to the point of this thread, I still want to find an easier way to deal with the limited capabilities of this terminal and it's output in game. Surely I'm not the only person in the history of CC to run into an issue with to much text output from a command to see.

Well, there's textutils.pagedPrint(), and you could indeed rig the print() function to output to a file. Eg, something along these lines:

local output, oldPrint = fs.open("somefile.txt", "w"), print

function print(...)
  for i = 1, #arg do arg[i] = tostring(arg[i]) end

  output.writeLine(table.concat(arg))
  output.flush()

  oldPrint(...)
end

You've mentioned "OpenCCPeripherals" (which doesn't exist) and a "getTargetDetails" peripheral call (which suggests OpenCCSensors), so at this point, I'm not even sure what peripheral mod you're trying to use. Are you, in fact, trying to use OpenCCSensors? If so, I'd be glad to take a look at what's going on, though if I recall correctly, last time I looked at it was around the time that AE2 didn't have any sort of API out yet. If you are actually using OpenCCSensors, let me know, or feel free to post an issue on the github repo.

Lyqyd, on 30 March 2015 - 06:09 AM said:

You've mentioned "OpenCCPeripherals" (which doesn't exist) and a "getTargetDetails" peripheral call (which suggests OpenCCSensors), so at this point, I'm not even sure what peripheral mod you're trying to use. Are you, in fact, trying to use OpenCCSensors? If so, I'd be glad to take a look at what's going on, though if I recall correctly, last time I looked at it was around the time that AE2 didn't have any sort of API out yet. If you are actually using OpenCCSensors, let me know, or feel free to post an issue on the github repo.

Yeah it's OpenCCSensors, sorry I've added so many mods today and looked at so many things trying to figure out a way to make this work that I get some names mixed together :)/>

According to this from Jun of 2014 it looks like at least the AE developer thinks the API is sufficient for making a mod that can interact with AE2.

http://ae-mod.info/Features/0526/?Offset=45

For me though, I'm probably going to have to just deal with not having it set up like I wanted. Me and a few friends binge on MC a few weeks at a time, so if it's not possible to do something now then I most likely won't get to make use of it during this binge lol.