Single app for GUI and console mode on Windows

The patch does not work as I expected. Typing "inkscape" in the command prompt should behave exactly as on Unix. I have some ideas how to do this, but until now none of them worked, so I'm leaving this as "In Progress".

Could I know what "does not work as expected". The patch is doing following: if you launch inkscape by clicking the icon, the stdout and stderr are redirected to invalid file handles as it is normal in windows applications. When inkscape is launched from a console, you will get the console output on the console (works on Windows XP and later) with all the eventual debugging messages. For instance all glib and gtk critical errors and warnings show. This can be useful when things are not doing what one expects. It is also good because one can produce one version with symbols, strip the symbols into a separate inkscape.exe.debug file and use that version as a normal version. When debugging is needed, one can just install the debug files and have all the console stuff present.

The problem is that Inkscape will immediately detach from the console, and any output will write over the command prompt. It's also not possible to use standard input (important e.g. for shell mode).

Yeah, it is true about the fact that it detaches from the console. But this is the closest to Unix way that one is able to get on windows, at least I did not get closer than that myself. I still guess that it is useful, because like that if user makes for instance "inkscape --help" on command prompt, he can read the output :)

Yes, it's more useful than a plain GUI app; but there's a second way, namely use a second executable named inkscape.com that will spawn the GUI app and feed its output to the console. I haven't had success with this approach so far, but it's definitely possible (it's essentially what the inkcl.py hack uses).

Doesn't inkscapec.exe - A Command Line Wrapper for Win32' from <http://kaioa.com/node/63> already do this?

«… a tiny console application, which spawns Inkscape (with the specified arguments) and captures its stdout (default output) and stderr (default error output) streams and redirects it to this console. …»

Yes, it looks like precisely the thing I wanted

Fixed in 9254. There are actually two executables, but the console executable has a .com extension and takes precedence over inkscape.exe when run from the command prompt. Finally, typing "inkscape" into the command prompt should work like it does on Unix.