in reply to perl opening a new command line window

There is no way to have a single process connected to 2 cli windows simulaneously under Win32. You could create a gui style window with either native calls or one of the gui toolkits.

It is possible to have multiple screen buffers associated with a single cli window. You can do this with Win32::Console. You then only need arrange for some key sequence to be recognised and trigger switching between the 2 or more screen buffers.

You could take this a stage further and package it up using a tied filehandle to represent the "alternate console" so that you could use Perl's standard IO to write to the multiple consoles.

If you don't like the idea of having to use a keysequence to allow you to view the various screens, you could take that a step further. Size the window to 160 x 48 and draw the different 'screens' in different portions of the one real screen. In fact, I frequently use an 8 point font in my console sessions which gives me a 250 x 120 screen, which could hold 15 80x24 sessions concurrently.


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