Hello all.

I'd like to display a bunch of debug information on the screen and then just keep adding to it without erasing anything. I tried using native.newTextBox but that erases the current contents after each textBox.text = ".."

What's the best approach here ?

thank you

You may want to look into using print statements (instead of using newTextBox). The print statement will spit out text on terminal, and it won't disappear unless you tell it to clear scroll back.

Naomi

Hi Naomi.

yes, I know about print statements but as you mentioned the output goes to the terminal and not to the screen.
I am debugging a multi touch application on the device itself so the terminal output is not the way to go for me. I need to be able to output the debug information to the screen, since getting to the terminal output when working on the device itself is VERY spotty, laggy and most of the time not coming thru at all.

cheers

Ah, sounds like print-statement isn't a good fit for what you need. Let's hope someone knowledgeable will jump in and help out.

Naomi

i often use display.newText for purposes of on-screen testing
it will not help you to display all your terminal information, but useful things can be done this way

what can you "print()" is what you also can "display.newText"

thanks for the reply ... but can you keep the information on the screen without overwriting it each time ? that's my goal here.
... adding more information to the text already on the screen without overwriting it.

why don't you just concatenate strings? something like this:

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local str = ""
local textfield = display.newText( str, 0, 0, native.systemFont, 12)
 
local update = function( morestring )
     str = str .. "\n" .. morestring
     textfield.text = str
end