Author Topic: atkpython interactive mode Windows 8.1 font color is set to background  (Read 5112 times)

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Offline Misha

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I'm not sure this is technically an installation problem but probably I'm not too off.

atkpython in freshly installed ATK 2014 doesn't work properly on my Windows 8.1 in the interactive mode. For some reason it sets both the background and the "standard" text (e.g. input and output) to black. See the first attached image, where in a terminal window the results of running ipython (the "standard" text is white) and atkpython (the "standard" text is invisible) are compared.

Changing colors in the properties of the terminal window helps only temporarily. This is demonstrated in the second attached window. After entering  In [1]: kkk I've changed the Font color to cyanish, which led to appearance of the already existing text but newly entered text would still be invisible (the color is reverted to black). After In [2]: kkk I've changed the background color to blue. This, again, showed the text missing after the previous step but once I've got to In [3] the color again is reverted to black. Changing the property of the shortcut (say, of "Command line terminal" in the ATK program folder) doesn't solve the problem.

This behavior renders atkpython unusable in the interactive mode. At the same time in the normal mode everything is fine.

I've found a temporary workaround: using ConsoleZ with changed font color, which unifies all output color-wise. Some niceties are gone but at least I can use atkpython. It would be great, however, to find out how to deal with the initial problem, so to make atkpython available in any console window.

Offline Anders Blom

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We have seen reports of this error before, but we haven't been able to reproduce it in-house. I'll check if we have any Win 8.1 machine where we can try. I'm very happy you found a work-around - and even more so that you posted it here for the benefit of other users, thank you very much.

Offline Misha

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Thank you for your response. I am, somewhat egoistically, glad to know that this is not a common behavior (while I understand that this makes it quite difficult to find its origin):  this lets me keeping the installation instructions for local users simple and dealing with the problem on the individual basis.

Offline Anders Blom

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I suppose it might be "common" as in "on all Windows 8.1 machines", but it's not so common because rather few users run in interactive mode.

Offline Anders Blom

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This problem appears also on Windows 10, and so it's becoming more of an issue now. It appears Microsoft has made some small changes to the console API in Windows 8, and these changes are actually included in pyreadline 2.1, which we will upgrade to soon. For now, as a workaround, you can download the attached file and place it in

C:\Program Files (x86)\QuantumWise\VNL-ATK-2014.3\lib\site-packages\pyreadline\console

(for each installation of ATK, incl 2015)

I  hope that solves the problem, it does for me anyway!