Trace in FDT without Debug Perspective

I recently switched to OS X, so I can’t use my beloved FlashDevelop. FDT is really the most viable option despite the price tag. It takes awhile to get used to Eclipse and get all the settings dialed in, but it’s worth it.

The only last major issue I had was getting trace output from the debug player to appear in the Eclipse console without launching a Debug task (way too much additional overhead just to see trace messages).

I’m on OS X which has ‘tail’ — if you’re on windows (why aren’t you using FlashDevelop?), you’ll have to use cygwin or get fancy with the batch scripting. There’s also something called tail.exe from MS…

Found this: http://flash-focus.blogspot.com/2007/06/creating-bare-bones-output-window-in.html which outlines how to configure the Debug Player to drop trace messages into a log file.

First, I followed those instructions … then in Eclipse added an External tool configuration:

Run >> External Tools >> External Tools Configurations
New Program
Location: /usr/bin/tail
Arguments: -f “/Users/MYUSER/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt”

I wasn’t able to point to the user Library via ~/Library — maybe that’s an Eclipse shortcoming…

Launch that, and it appears as one of the running console logs, then you can run your build normally, ANT or what-have-you, and you’ll still get the trace output without all the debug perspective stuff, and it’s about a zillion times faster. Yay!

Seems like there ought to be console level configuration somewhere, but I’m no Eclipse expert.

Hope this helps someone else.