SWT and RCP (web RAP/RWT)[eclipse], EMF Displaying the console in your RCP application

This question has been asked on eclipse.newcomer a couple of times now, so I thought it might be worthwhile to put a response in the blogosphere.

How do I display the System.out console in a view in my Eclipse RCP application?

 

The answer has two parts. To start, you can redirect console output to an arbitrary PrintStream using System.setOut(somePrintStream);. The second part is that you need a useful PrintStream to write on.

It’s relatively easy to make a plug-in that does exactly what we need. Here’s how you construct the view.

package org.eclipse.console.ui.views;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.PrintStream;

import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.DisposeEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.DisposeListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text;
import org.eclipse.ui.part.ViewPart;

public class LightweightConsoleView extends ViewPart {
 private Text text;

 public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
  text = new Text(parent, SWT.READ_ONLY | SWT.MULTI);
  OutputStream out = new OutputStream() {
   @Override
   public void write(int b) throws IOException {
    if (text.isDisposed()) return;
    text.append(String.valueOf((char) b));
   }
  };
  final PrintStream oldOut = System.out;
  System.setOut(new PrintStream(out));
  text.addDisposeListener(new DisposeListener() {
   public void widgetDisposed(DisposeEvent e) {
    System.setOut(oldOut);
   }
  });
 }

 public void setFocus() {
  text.setFocus();
 }
}