Unexpected appearance of Arduino IDE using CLI

[hanabanana]

I tried using the official CLI of arduino 1.5.5-r2. It worked except that it opened up the Arduino IDE window after issuing the command, compiled and downloaded the sketch, then autoclosed itself. This is not consistent with what has been described in the documents. Is this a known bug? If so, is there a workaround like setting a hidden flag or something?

Thanks for any help.

[matthijskooijman]

This was fixed in 1.5.6 already.

[hanabanana]

Thanks, Matthijs. I tried it out and it no longer shows the content of the IDE but just the Arduino logo. Is there a way to make everything completely hidden as in not show anything?

[matthijskooijman]

Oh, the splash screen of course. I've been developing this on Linux, which I think doesn't show the splash screen (or perhaps it's only used in release builds, dunno). Perhaps there is a (hidden) preference to disable the splash screen altogether, though I do not think there is a comprehensive list of them anywhere.

In any case, I'll see if I can fix this in the code for the next release. Thanks for reporting.

[matthijskooijman]

@matthijskooijman

[matthijskooijman]

Hmm, looking around it seems the splash screen is shown by the launcher, not by the java application itself. I think this means we won't be able to toggle it based on a commandline option.

However, perhaps we can make an arduino.exe to run from the commandline and a arduino_gui.exe to run from e.g. the startmenu? Both binaries would be identical, except that only the latter uses the splash screen.

As a side effect, this means that if you run arduino from the commandline without --verify or --upload, the GUI will be shown without the splash screen, but I don't think that is a problem in any way.

@cmaglie, how does that sound? Are there other options?

[ffissore]

Sorry for the late reply.
Since release 1.5.7, the Windows version has two ways for starting the IDE: arduino.exe will show the splash screen, arduino_debug.exe will not and will echo to the terminal whatever gets printed on the black lower part of the ide.

[Lauszus]

This is still a issue on Mac OS X. I got it working by removing: https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/blob/master/build/build.xml#L321, but of course that is not a usable fix.

[ffissore]

Yep. Problem is that splash screen is a command line arg. On Linux we have a bash script, so we may make args dynamic. On win and mac they are not. On win you can use arduino_debug (although the name looks weird) but on mac we have one binary only, so no joy

[FlsZen]

In addition to Lauszus' suggestion, I also wanted the dock icon to not show so I added "-Dapple.awt.UIElement=true" into Info.plist.

[ffissore]

I've googled around once more and I'm sorry to say this kind of macosx issues are a "wontfix". Tagging them as such and leaving them open until something better than a hack is found