Is there a way to clean up the console window?

357mag

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 31, 2023
Messages
90
Programming Experience
3-5
I saw when I ran a console project in Visual Studio 2022, that the console window now has some garbage in it which it never had before. Underneath your program's output it shows the directory path and process exited with exit code 0. I was wondering if there is any way to get rid of that.

That stuff always has annoyed me. That's one of the reasons I like Eclipse. Nice clean output window.
 
I've tried things like Console.ReadLIne and some other ways, but when you press the space bar or Enter key you will still get that message. Just makes my program look like shit. I don't think there is a way to disable that.

Oh...I found a way but you have to press F5 instead of CTRL + F5. Plus you have to check the box "Automatically close the console when debugging stops...".

The program starts a bit slower however.
 
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That stuff only shows up when you run within Visual Studio. If you actually run your code in a real console window rather than the one launched by Visual Studio you won't get that extra text.
 
Okay. But what is a real console window? And where do I find one? Are you talking about the cmd window that comes with Windows?
 
Yes. The CMD window, or the new Windows Terminal that let you run CMD, PowerShell, PowerShell 7, Bash, etc.
 
Once you build your project, VS outputs an executable file, i.e. an EXE. You run that like you would any other Windows program. There are multiple ways to do that but that's general computer use, not programming, so it really isn't something that should need to be explained here. The two most obvious options are to open a console window yourself first and then run execute the file there and to double-click the file in File Explorer. The latter option will generally close the window once the program exits, while the former will not. If you're using VS, you also have the option to create a Release build and the use the Start Without Debugging option.
 
I found a file called application, which I believe is the .exe file. I double-clicked it and it opened but closed really fast. I tried dragging the file into the cmd window, and then I hit Enter, and I was able to see the output of my program. But there is still lots of junk in the window.

Not sure what you mean by run execute the file there. I know how to open a cmd window, but how do you run execute the file there? What do I type at the prompt?
 
If you don't know how to use Windows, you should do some research on how to use Windows. This is not programming and not something we should have to teach you here.

The command prompt accepts various commands. Once open, you can use "cd" to change directory to the folder containing your EXE and then you can type the EXE name to run it. Do some reading on what commands are supported at the command prompt.

BTW, your program file will be named after your project. If you named the project MyCoolProject then the output will be MyCoolProject.exe. It will be somewhere under the bin folder under your project folder. Note that, if you're not debugging, you should probably be running a Release build rather than a Debug build.
 
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