Porthole is just a front-end for the emerge command which can generate amazing amounts of output. The challenge for most users is to discover what's important and what is not out of the thousands of lines of emerge output. Porthole's answer to this challenge is it's terminal window (figure 1).
The terminal window filters out warnings, cautions and summary information into separate tabs. This allows the user to find critical information that would normally be like finding a needle in a haystack. In addition, different types of information are color-coded for emphasis.
The terminal window consists of a menu bar and five tabs. The tabs appear only as needed. For example, if there were no warnings found, the warning tab will never be visible.
The terminal window also supports an emerge queue so you can select more than one package to install without having to wait for the previous one to finish!
The process tab (figure 1) holds the raw emerge command output. The process tab has a built-in kill button that performs the same action as the Process -> Kill Process menu. Each line of output is numbered for reference in the summary and warning tabs.
Color coding is applied to certain lines to highlight the following situations:
Note that when you run a emerge --pretend, Porthole will look through the emerge history and try to find how long it will take to emerge that package. That information will be highlighted in the note color.
Porthole will filter out any warnings/cautions and place them into the corresponding tab (figure 2). In addition to warnings/cautions these tabs also display the command and emerge information lines using the color coding scheme. This allows you to identify which package the messages originated from.
One of the really useful features of this tab is the ability to jump directly to the message location in the process terminal by simply double-clicking on the line in question. When you do this Porthole will switch to the process tab and bring the desired line into focus near the center of the tab's window. When you find an error it is good to check the process window because there may be additional lines associated with the error that were not picked up by the filter.
Like the warning/caution tab, the summary tab (figure 3) is a filtered view of the process window. Unlike the others though, it displays not only informational mesages but major error messages as well.
Porthole also attempts to filter messages that direct you to perform additional actions after the emerge is complete like the reminder to run etc-update.
It also displays the command and emerge information lines using the color coding scheme so you can identify the origin of the message.
The summary tab also supports double-clicking on the line number to open the process window.
The queue (figure 4) displays a list of all the packages selected for emerge and displays the status of the emerge. Each line in the queue lists first the package short name followed by the full command string.
Status is represented via icons which are described below. Please be aware that different schemes will use different icons, so your system may not look exactly like this. The following descriptions refer to figure 4 as an example.