Spinner is messing up devtools::check() output

[jimhester]

E.g.

 OKhecking for file ‘devtools/DESCRIPTION’ ...

I can't figure out a good way to get back to the end of the previous line using ANSII escape codes to fix this, maybe you have some ideas.

[gaborcsardi]

There are ANSI sequences for this, but they are not very useful in this case, because \r is the only thing that works everywhere (Rgui, R.app, RStudio).

We'll figure out sg. We can always disable the spinner.

[jimhester]

It would be fine if \b would backspace over newlines like it does in most languages, but it does not :-/

[gaborcsardi]

I think you can just turn the spinner off for now. Is that OK?

[jimhester]

I don't really mind the messed up output, but it would be nice to have a general solution to this problem and I am not sure one exists with how the escape codes are currently handled by the R console.

[gaborcsardi]

AFAIK Rgui, R.app and RStudio only handle \r, so there is no good solution, apart from building a UI around this. I.e. leaving some space there for the spinner, and re-printing the line before a \n.

[gaborcsardi]

I can also turn off the spinner by default.

[gaborcsardi]

I think devtools::check could just call callr with spinner = FALSE. Here: https://github.com/hadley/devtools/blob/ab176e699cef187feb5343a1b09c98b34a07db82/R/check.r#L169