How to hide return value for process.stdout.write() in Nodejs REPL?

Question

I'm doing some drawings in the terminal and want to hide the return value.

Example:

> process.stdout.write("Hello world");
Hello worldtrue

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have 2 tricks in my bag that allow you to do this, based on the documentation: Customizing REPL Output

Trick 1

Create a repl.js file with the following code:

require('repl').start({ prompt: '> ', writer: function myWriter() { return ''} });

Start your REPL with node repl.js
The above code uses the writer function to customize the output, as mentioned in the docs. You could assign the prompt blank as well, to further reduce the output.

Trick 2

Type this in your REPL

require('util').inspect = function () { return '' };

The docs hint that the inspect function is used to format the output, so we are replacing it with a function returning blank to silence the output.