Your suggestions sounds possible to me. If you are up for it, I suggest trying to implement it, and offering it as a patch.
Tom writes: > On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 2:55 PM, John Kitchin <jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu> > wrote: > >> I am pretty sure this is not directly possible right now. >> >> Some approaches that resemble it could be: >> 1. write a src block that will be tangled to a script. >> 2. tangle the block >> 3. Run the script in a shell src block with an & so it runs >> non-blocking. >> >> or, use an elisp block like: >> >> (org-babel-tangle) >> (async-shell-command "your script" some-output-buffer) >> >> I don't know a way to get continuous updated output in an org-buffer >> though. >> > > Thanks for the response. I didn't necessarily expect continuous output into > the org-buffer itself to work, but I don't see why the Python subprocess > can't display output as it occurs. After all, it uses comint, and comint > certainly has facilities for collecting output incrementally while still > displaying it (cf comint-output-filter-functions). > > It looks to me like the problem is that org-babel-comint-with-output uses a > "while" loop to collect process output (ob-comint.el:92). At least, it > could insert the output into the subprocess buffer and make redisplay > happen. > > But I'm not sure why the code is written that way anyway. Long running > "while" loops in Emacs code don't seem like a good idea to begin with. > Wouldn't the more natural way for this code to be written in Emacs be the > following? > > - an output filter gets added to the subprocess that collects output > - the code is sent to the subprocess for execution > - the command returns > - the output filter inserts any data it gets into the subprocess buffer, > into its "results" data structure, perhaps even into the org-buffer > - when the output filter gets the eoe-indicator, it removes itself from the > output filter list and sends a notification that execution has completed > > If the user schedules a second block for execution, the simplest thing to > do is return an error if there is already a block executing for that > subprocess; alternatively, it could be queued somewhere. > > Thanks, > Tom -- Professor John Kitchin Doherty Hall A207F Department of Chemical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412-268-7803 @johnkitchin http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu
