[Openmcl-devel] startup 'terminal' window

[Gary Byers]

I'm afraid that I don't really have much of a model of how your 
application is structured, of what behavior you're seeing and of
what behavior you want to see, or of what any of this has to do
with CCL.

Besides noting that Windows, X environments under Linux, and OSX
all have different views of:

- whether there's a distinction between "console applications"
and "GUI applications" (and, if so, how that distinction is
maintained)
- (related) what it means for an application to be associated
with a console or terminal window
- what happens (in general and in specific cases) when someone
opens an icon in a desktop environment,

it's not clear what to say that could be useful.

On OSX, must things that you'd think of as GUI applications are
packaged as application bundles (special directories whose extension
is ".app" and whose contents follow certain conventions.)  If you
double-click on "foo.app"'s icon in the Finder, the application
starts up, with its own icon in the Dock and its own menubar; the
new process's standard input comes from the null device and output
goes to some logging device.  If you execute "open foo.app" in a
shell or shell script, essentially the same things (includung
the I/O redirection) happen as when the file is opened in the Finder.
(The "open" in that case is just "/usr/bin/open", which basically
just uses the same system services that the Finder uses to open
files and URLs that it receives as command-line arguments.)

The actual executable involved in running "foo.app" is nside the 
Contents/MacOS subdirectory of the .app bundle.  (The exectuable
file is often the only file in that directory and its name often
matches the bundle directory's name without the ".app"; its name
is specified as the value of some XML key in Contents/Info.plist.)
If you run the executable directly (in the shell or a shell script):

shell> /path/to/foo.app/Contents/MacOS/foo

then most things will likely be the same as they would be if the
app was launched via "open" or the Finder; one notable difference
is that the I/O redirection won't have happened and the process
will remain connected to the same standard I/O streams as the
parent (shell) uses (unless of course it's invoked with some
sort of explicit redirection.)

If you double-click on a non-.app executable file in the Finder,
the Finder will generally open a Terminal.app window and run
the executable "in that window" (e.g., with its standard input
coming from and standard output going to that Terminal window.)
It seems to do this via a technique not obviously different from
writing a .cmd file somewhere and then opening that file.

If you select an application bundle in the Finder and right-click
(or ctrl-click) on it, you'll get a menu with an option named
"Show Package Contents" (or something similar.)  If you select
that option and navigate to the executable inside Contents/MacOS,
you'll get similar behavior.

Again, I can't tell from your message what application is not
(accidentally or intentionally) display a console/terminal
window or what CCL has to do with this, and I don't know whether
any of the above is directly useful.  A program's behavior in this
regard has a lot to do with how it's invoked, and this may be
more true on OSX than on other platforms.




On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, Phil Armitage wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I distribute my GUI (LTK) application on three platforms (Mac OS X,
> Windows and Linux) as either:
>
> 1) a directory containing a Lisp compiler + my code + required systems
> + a shell script to start it all up
> 2) a platform specific binary.
>
> Either way, when I start the application by double-clicking I get the
> GUI window *and* a 'terminal' window with the output from the Lisp
> system. On Windows (currently using CLISP or SBCL) I can hide this
> second window (actually it's really the first window) by having the
> user run a small C program which starts the actual binary before
> hiding itself from view. On Linux, this doesn't happen at all.
>
> Is there anything I can do with CCL on OS X? I've looked at the
> available compiler options but can see nothing related to this and
> I've tried fiddling around with .command files, .term files and even
> Apple Script but all to no avail. As things stand, I get complaints
> from users about this so any help would be much appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
>
> -- 
> Phil Armitage
> http://phil.nullable.eu/
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