Suggestion: "monitor mode"

[kevklam]

Hi! First of all, just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for packaging this.

I wanted to mention that due to a number of instabilities with interactive mode (#18 , curses messing up when window resizes, crashing when external drive is removed), I think it's quite risky to let interactive mode do the plotting... whereas the 'plot' mode seems pretty stable. What I ended up doing is running in 'plot' mode in one terminal, then editing interactive.py to completely remove the plotting functionality (I could also have just put it in 'inactive' mode but I didn't want to accidentally hit 'p' and turn it back on) and running that in a separate terminal. This has worked out much better for me, since I can just restart the interactive terminal when it has problems without losing progress.

Would be nice to make this an actual feature. Not sure if you care to do it since this is a windows fork of the original, but thought I'd mention it here since I suspect most of the instability is related to Windows and doesn't apply as much to the original.

[elJosho]

^ this

[elJosho]

also, if you let interactive mode spawn the plots (instead of 'plotman plot') and Ctrl-C it (to reload the config or fix broken curses UI), I've found that the plots are stopped as well. When they're spawned by 'plotman plot' they seem to persist not just if you Ctrl-C the 'plotman interactive' process, but even if you Ctrl-C the 'plotman plot' process (which is how it supposed to work, since it's technically supposed to be stateless and just works off of the chia log file to determine it's status and if it's time to start a new plot).

wanted to throw in that this I also really, really appreciate @wolfrage76 packing this up to work on Windows. I was already rsymcing the plots to a Pi4 so the lack of archiving wasn't even an issue for me, I needed a good way to manage plots in parallel, and my own (weak) efforts to get plotman to run on Win10 wasn't getting anywhere, and am very happy I found this!