VSColorOutput To Rider Plugin Prospects
This is a question about plugin development. In Visual Studio, I use VSColorOutput, which is just miles better than the output window in Rider. And its also a feature that I don't think I could live without and its the main thing preventing me from making the move to Rider.
That is what the options look like. Its a fairly simple extension, it simply defines regex patterns (the default ones are just fine but you can customize if you want), and then lets you color your output window based on those pattern matches.
The result is you get output like this:
Which is just far more readable. Rider DOES color errors and warnings which is nice, but everything else is a sea of white. Even just the “Build Started:” section colorization is a massive boost to readability in the logs.
So my question is, is this functionality even possible to implement in a Rider plugin? I don't want to dig too far into Rider plugin development if its not even possible. But if someone tells me its possible to define regex patterns for syntax highlighting in the console window with w/e API Rider has available for their plugins, I'll start trying to find a way to port this to Rider.
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The console color configuration in Rider: (Settings | Editor | Color Scheme | Console Colors). It could be controlled by predefined color schemes.
There is a corresponding Color Scheme Management system for plugin development.
Tao Sun VSColorOutput adds color highlighting where there wasn't any. There's Console output without ANSII codes, so that plugin uses regular expressions and assigns colors based on known context. Rider's Color Scheme settings isn't going to suddenly do that, so that's unfortunately not helpful here.
This is what you want, GrepConsole, it's designed for highlighting things on the console just like
VSColorOutput.The existing regex don't work for Unreal output, so I had to add my own regex:
Annoyingly it doesn't use your color theme, so you have to manually select colors you want to use. Also it's default changes the background color instead of the foreground color, so you may want to mess around with its default settings.