Suggestion: shell on window's back

[Marvin Lampe]

Everyone will surely know a situation like that: You're running a program  
for a while and suddenly something unexpected happens. The application  
crashes, freezes or gets insufferable slow.
You forgot to start the program inside a console before, and now can't get  
any information for debugging. The conditions which led to the crash  
aren't reproducible (you don't remember what you did since
the launch of the program or you just have no idea what the hell caused  
the crash) and you can't solve the problem now. The only thing you can do  
is to wait until the problem occurs again and then hopefully
have started the application inside a shell...

I think it would be nice to have a feature for displaying the stdout of an  
application in a handy way without having to start it in a separate  
console.
Every time a new application gets launched, there should be a shell  
starting with it. The main problem with this is that the shell would be  
quite annoying until it gets useful. It consumes place in
your window list and is floating around your desktop. So my idea here is  
to put that console on the process' window back, and allow the user to  
flip the window by a quadruple click,
pulling the lower right corner to the upper right or something like that,  
perhaps with a nice compositing effect :-).
The possible problem of several child windows by one single application  
(for example in The Gimp) could be solved by displaying the stdout of the  
root process on the back of every child window.

I would appreciate you to comment on this.

Thanks,
Marvin Lampe