Focus active manim shell when running "Preview Selected Manim Code"

[bhoov]

(building a small scene in manim for work and am recording features that would be nice for my workflow)

When debugging a scene, I find that I often want to check the state of data that is underlying the visualization. The nicest way to do these "debug" statements is to type cmd+' cmd+r to run selected lines (they may be as simple as printing shapes or values of existing objects). However, I then have to find the terminal that is running the active manim session to see the output.

[VladimirFokow]

maybe for this: add a checkbox in the settings?
(if some users want it and some don't)?

[Splines]

Ben, would you like that the shell opens whenever you use this shortcut? Or just in some scenarios, e.g. for "debug" statements. E.g. even if we had a checkbox in the settings, it could be beneficial to have a sperate command to run in the shell AND open the respective shell that the command was run in. Since maybe most of the time you don't really need the terminal when just previewing.

Would a command like Open Active Manim Terminal be a way to go? Another idea is to parse the output and only open the terminal if something other than the Manim Progress updates is output, e.g. your custom print statement.

[bhoov]

YES. Having an "Open active manim terminal cmd" that can be arbitrarily bound to a hotkey is perfect. Thanks @Splines.

My idea is that whenever you run a specific selection of lines, you may want to see what happens in the video, or what the data looks like (perhaps w/ print statements) in the terminal. My workflow would say I would always want to see both if I run just specific lines. But let's not develop to my specific workflow right now, this is not an urgent issue

[Splines]

Ok, so what could be implemented in the future:

• Add command: "Open active Manim Terminal"
• Add a config setting to decide if the Manim Terminal should be focused whenever we preview a cell.
• What stays the same: whenever the Manim Terminal shows an error, it is automatically opened, regardless of any user setting.