03.05.08
Symbian Text shell
I frequently write test code which executes in a “text shell” test harness. This is the Symbian equivalent of running from the dos command prompt.
Aside from enabling the essential automation of unit and regression tests, a key advantage of a text shell test harness is that the emulator will boot in a few seconds rather than the excruciating minutes required for the full S60 environment. In the text shell, the edit->build->run cycle frequency is vastly improved when compared with running a full UI app.
For the emulator, Symbian has a fairly convoluted way of supporting this use case and I always forget what the correct options are. So I’ve documented them here for Symbian 9.x.