Question

I have two threads – one awaits for input and the other is printing the debugging info.

However only one console window, so I can’t type ‘exit’ (or whatever to stop the process), because System.out.println constantly prints the stuff. Can I have two separate console windows for each?

P.S. I wouldn’t want to use Swing just for this purpose – there must be a way.

Answer 1

The only way I could think of would be to have two difference processes and a link betweeen the two processes. But I don’t have a clue as to how to do that. Perhaps your best bet is to use the JOptionPane class.

While you stated that you don’t want to use Swing, I believe that JOptionPane would be the best option for you. Simply using JOptionPane.showInputDialog is a fast way to solve your issue. Here’s a link to JOptionPane’s JavaDoc.

If you really can’t use Swing, there’s always the option to press Ctrl + C to stop the process.

A final option would be to buffer the output and only write it after the input. After you receive input, you would flush the buffer and then deal with the input. In this manner, you would prevent the application from closing before the buffer is flushed. There are two ways to do this:

1. You can use a BufferedWriter with a very large size (maybe 100,000?) and store this as a static variable. Instead of calling System.out.println(), you could call MyClass.out.println()
2. You could override System using System.setOut(). You would create your own PrintWriter that would take any input and send it to a LinkedList (or your own LinkedList designed for chars, if you choose). I suggest you use a linked list because appending is O(1) for a linked list while appending is O(n) for an array list.

Edit:

As for hmjd’s suggestion (file writing), you would do that like this:

System.setOut(new FileWriter(new File(myFileName)));