[tm-dev] Opening a connection in TerminalView programatically

[Kris De Volder <kdvolder@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all, I'm trying to reuse the TerminalView in our Grails tooling (see https://github.com/SpringSource/grails-ide ).
We want to use this to launch and connect to an external grails process and display the output of this process (uses ANSI to make some colored text etc).

I was pretty quickly able to create a new GrailsTerminalConnector with its own 'settings page' to allow a user to connect to the grails process.
So I was pretty pleased with how nice and easy this was.

Unfortunately, this is not precisely what we want. What we want is a 'UI-less' connection that is programmatically instantiated by our tools whenever they execute a grails command. I'm really stuck. Looking around the code reading comments etc. it seems like there is clearly the intention for this to be possible. E.g
  - the 'hidden' attribute on the extension point
  - some comments on the 'org.eclipse.tm.internal.terminal.provisional.api.ITerminalConnector.makeSettingsPage()' method talk about 'UI-less' connectors.
 
However, as far as I've been able to figure out the methods of terminal view for opening connection programmatically are simple not available or private.

Maybe I'm missing something and/or not looking in the right place?

If it is possible, I would appreciate a pointer on how to work with 'UI-less' TerminalConnector  instances. (E.g. a pointer to some code doing this in one of the projects would help a lot).

If this is in fact not (yet) possible, I would be interested in making it possible by preparing a patch (but before jumping into that, I'd figure I'd at least ask here and get some input).

Thanks for your time,

Kris De Volder