Question

The application creates and displays various Swing widgets, and also writes debugging messages to System.out. If I start it as java -jar ...jar then I see it, but if I click on jar file in GUI I don’t see the console. How to make it show console to user explicitly, e.g. on reaction to “View -> Debug output” menu item?

Expecting something that will pop up cmd.exe window on Windows, xterm/… on Linux, but it may be Swing window as well. How to do it the easily?

Answer 1

First don’t use System.out to log, use some Logging framework to write logs in some file and to display the debugging logs open a new JDialog with JTextArea or JTextPane in it. Read the log file content and display that in the textArea. This way it will also solve platform dependency.