I have an ESP3S3 chip connected to my laptop through its USB. I want to see the output of the board on the esp-idf-cmd terminal while also being able to save the terminal output (say as a .txt file) while it's still running. ( I have a few tests that I want to do on the board output with some .py scripts I have on my pc)
idf.py -p PORT flash monitor > log.txt
this does not do what I want, it only saves AFTER the program stops running, I don't have that guarantee, the program might crash, but I still want that log up until that point, also if I do this I won't be able to use the ctrl+] to exit my esp-program.
idf.py -p PORT flash monitor | tee log.txt
this causes encoding issues and several attempts to go around this seem not to work.
"encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encodeUnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\ufffd' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>
I'm not sure what direction I should even take this.
Looking at idf.py documentation it seems like the shortcut Ctrl-T Ctrl-L enables logging to file.
Dumping output of monitor into a file with tee is fine as well, you just have to remember that this is not a text file, but raw data stream from UART. It includes console escape sequences for coloured text. You can dump it to your terminal as is with cat logfile.txt. If you don't want coloured output, look at this post on how to remove the escape sequences.
As an alternative you can build your ESP32 project to output log without colour.