improve formatting of test output

[stamblerre]

See the original issue (microsoft/vscode-go#2003).
We should add colorization for test output. We can also look at other ways to improve the UI.

[hyangah]

Or more generally, https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/tasks

[oliverpool]

@firelizzard18 has done an extension which seems to supports the tasks of vs-code:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ethan-reesor.vscode-go-test-adapter

Source code (MIT License):
https://gitlab.com/firelizzard/vscode-go-test-adapter

[firelizzard18]

My extension is a Test Adapter that plugs into the Test Explorer UI extension. I wrote/adapted the code to identify, execute, and collect the output of tests. The infrastructure is @hbenl’s work. My extension is somewhat barebones and does not integrate with tasks. I would be happy to work with the Go and/or VSCode team on improvements or on integrating the test adapter into vscode-go.

A lot of the limitations stem from go test and go tool test2json. Go’s test infrastructure is not built for post processing. There are some issues that may improve the situation, but that doesn’t help users of older versions of Go.

[oliverpool]

I investigated a bit the PHPunit extension, which has a colorized output.

It uses a vscode.Task with a ShellExecution to have a terminal which has colored output:
https://github.com/elonmallin/vscode-phpunit/blob/516ac9d/src/extension.ts#L57-L64

With the help of problemMatchers (https://github.com/elonmallin/vscode-phpunit/blob/fc63dff67ebc7cea834292ac86c55a0882c0bea9/package.json#L145) the error gets reported to the editor.

---

The tricky part would be to adapt the post-processing of the output that is currently done (expandFilePathInOutput & co.): https://github.com/golang/vscode-go/blob/6a61856/src/testUtils.ts#L339-L355

[PhilHarnish]

I love that colorization works with the test explorer but I noticed the command palette (and several other sources) still use the terminal. As far as I can tell, the test explorer version is feature complete (e.g. clickable links to source files).

Is it feasible to route everything through the test explorer implementation? (Of course, you'd need to honor go.testExplorer.enable which makes the request kinda expensive to maintain...)

[firelizzard18]

The plan is to rework the old test capabilities into the new test explorer framework. At that point, go.testExplorer.enable would control whether the test resolver was registered with VSCode's test explorer system, but even if that was disabled the test resolver would still be active.

As long as go.testExplorer.enable is disabled, the only thing the test resolver would do is scan files as you open them, so it's impact would be relatively low.

[ysmood]

We should strip the special color chars if it's hard to support it for now:

Now the terminal output is correct, but other parts are not.

[firelizzard18]

@ysmood That is a change that needs to be made in VSCode. The test API provides a method to record output. That output goes to both the terminal and the peek view. There is no way to make different output show up in those two places.

[deefdragon]

Atleast for tests, would a viable solution to be to have the Run[Package|Tile] Tests helpers above the functions execute the test via the Test Explorer to get coloring? It feels weird to have 2 different ways to run a tests that output like it currently does.

[firelizzard18]

@deefdragon That was my plan. First add test explorer support (which I’ve done), then incrementally refactor the original test support to use the new system. But I was contributing in my free time and I no longer have the time to work on this.

[firelizzard18]

This will be OBE if #3523 is merged, given that the plan is to replace the code lenses with the new test explorer system, as that would mean all test runs will go through vscode's testing API.