4 ms·

I dream that someday I can cut and paste from the command prompt. I mean, I'm really happy that Microsoft is actually making improvements to parts of windows th

by galago 11y ago

I dream that someday I can cut and paste from the command prompt. I mean, I'm really happy that Microsoft is actually making improvements to parts of windows that have been needlessly awkward for decades.

lockyc 11y ago
you can now in Windows 10
- dan-silver 11y ago
  Details of what's changed in the win 10 console https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-improvements-in-the-windows-10-technical-preview/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-im...
  - phillco 11y ago
    Interesting that they default QuickEdit mode to on now. In Windows 2000 (supposedly), they had to roll a hotfix because some well-meaning engineer made the same change without thinking of backwards compatibility. [2] Kinda shows how times have changed. [1] "One of the top requested changes we’ve received over the years is to have quick-edit mode enabled by default. Tada!" [2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/13/4886108.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/13/48861...
    - eurekin 11y ago
      I remember on a few occasions staring puzzled at some script at work, which was taking a lot more time to run, than normally. Like an hour instead of few minutes. I remember also, that coworkers had the same issue. One of them left work once, leaving a long process running. He came back the next day and it hadn't finish yet. He was ready to file a bug report somewhere, when we found out... If you click on the command prompt with the QuickEdit mode turned on, in a "wrong way", the underlying process will be frozen. It's because the input and output streams are blocked indefinitely, until you finish your selection and the content gets copied to the clipboard. So, why would you want to click on it? There is a common pattern people use for long running scripts: they push the window somewhere in the background, but leave a little space you can click on, so that you can view it very quickly. The "wrong way" of clicking is when you do click-drag instead of a point click. It goes automatically into the QuickEdit mode freezing everything underneath it.
- eggy 11y ago
  I still have the classic environment variables window and single line text boxes. Must be a setting somewhere... However, regarding the command prompt, I unchecked 'use legacy console' and now I can do much more. Transparency is something I am used to in Blender3D and Linux. Now with Ctrl-Shift-+ or -, I can vary the transparency!
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    The linked post notes that the new environment variables stuff is in the preview build 10565. I presume you'll only get that build if you select the Insider build channel. I'm still on the standard release build 10240 which still has the old environment settings box.
pmorici 11y ago
You can cut and paste from the command prompt if you go to properties and check the "Quick Edit Mode" option. It lets you highlight with the left mouse button and copy by simply clicking the right. w/o quick edit you first have to select 'Mark' from the context menu then you can highlight text to copy paste. It has worked this way as long as I can remember.
- baddox 11y ago
  And, bizarrely, the keyboard shortcut to copy marked text is Enter.
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    In Windows 10, you can use Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste. If they don't work, right click the command prompt titlebar, select Properties and then the Options tab, and turn on "Enable Ctrl key shortcuts". In this same properties page, you may also find "Enable line wrapping selection" and "Extended text selection keys" useful.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    Because Ctrl+C was used for "interrupt" long before the concept of copy-paste came into being. Enter is often used to signify the positive end of an operation.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      If you enable the Ctrl shortcuts for clipboard operations, what shortcut do you use to stop a running process? Has one been made available?
      - ygra 11y ago
        How about Ctrl+C? The meaning is unambiguous: If there is a selection, Ctrl+C is handled by the console host and copies the selection. If there is no selection, Ctrl+C is passed on to the running program which then does whatever it likes with it (i.e. in many cases terminate itself).
ratsmack 11y ago
And there is nothing more awkward than trying to manipulate file ACL's in those tiny dialogues that you can't resize. I would think that it would be easy to fix the resize problem, but its almost as if they had some compelling reason keep them at a fixed size.
- douche 11y ago
  I've never understood that either. Those are just Win32 windows, right? So you change a window-style flag, and it should become resizable, right? I'm tempted to go mess around and see if I can hook into those windows with COM somehow and twiddle some bits... Maybe the rest of the dialog controls are all fixed dimensions and non-autosizable. Still, that seems like the kind of thing you could unleash a platoon of interns on and modernize, though.
  - ygra 11y ago
    > Maybe the rest of the dialog controls are all fixed dimensions and non-autosizable. That's exactly the problem. Raw Win32 doesn't really have provisions for layouting containers and auto-resize behaviour. So you'd essentially have to handle WM_SIZE and reposition/resize all controls in the dialog. Such code is cumbersome to write, awkward to change and annoying to debug/test (e.g. you still need to check that you don't change something to negative sizes and/or constrain the window dimensions appropriately). And in the end you have a few hundred lines of code that are intricately linked to the current dialog layout and, in part, even replicate the layout. So you cannot even easily change the layout anymore. This is quite a bit of a cost associated with that. Inventing layout containers on the Win32 side seems a pointless idea as well, considering that nearly no one except Microsoft actually uses the API at that level, so improvements here have little benefit for lots of work. Most people most likely use wrappers around it that offer such things (e.g. Windows Forms), or things that take care of their own rendering and offer layout containers (WPF, Swing, GTK, Qt, ...). So I guess if MS offered the usual layout mechanisms in Win32 people would just shrug and ask »Why? I already have those things in the toolkit I use. Can't they devote development resources to actually important things?«.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Yeah, you can do that. It even does the sane thing with regard to lines.
- douche 11y ago
  No more rectangular console text selection? I've got to find a way to turn that on, I guess. My Win10 box is still doing the same old thing. Also, seriously, is there a way to get the console to reliably remember the size and layout settings between launches? At least half the time I launch something with a console window, it's smashed into a 80x25 window, with the ridiculously low 300 line scroll history.
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    For the text selection, see my other comment in this thread and turn on the "Enable line wrapping selection". For the command window size and scrollback buffer, I've always had good luck - in Windows 10 and older versions - by setting the options in the Layout tab of the command prompt property pages. I also use the Font tab to select Consolas. It is true that some programs that open their own command window don't follow these settings, but I usually open cmd.exe and go from there.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    If the command is lauched from a link, right click on it, click Properties, edit the config, hit OK.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    Yeah, there's a word wrap selection setting in win10. For window size that's been easy to fix since forever. Just click the upper left corner icon and select either properties or defaults. Properties changes the settings for the shortcut if it was launched from one, defaults changes the settings for all cmd windows. In addition to window size and selection mode you can change the font and colors and whatnot.
  - saratogacx 11y ago
    Hold down alt when making the selection and you'll select in block mode instead of line mode.
galago 11y ago
All of the comments here are useful. Thanks!
czwzmuwwwk 11y ago
Doesn't ConEmu allow for this?

by galago 11y ago

lockyc 11y ago

you can now in Windows 10

dan-silver 11y ago
Details of what's changed in the win 10 console https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-improvements-in-the-windows-10-technical-preview/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-im...
- phillco 11y ago
  Interesting that they default QuickEdit mode to on now. In Windows 2000 (supposedly), they had to roll a hotfix because some well-meaning engineer made the same change without thinking of backwards compatibility. [2] Kinda shows how times have changed. [1] "One of the top requested changes we’ve received over the years is to have quick-edit mode enabled by default. Tada!" [2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/13/4886108.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/13/48861...
  - eurekin 11y ago
    I remember on a few occasions staring puzzled at some script at work, which was taking a lot more time to run, than normally. Like an hour instead of few minutes. I remember also, that coworkers had the same issue. One of them left work once, leaving a long process running. He came back the next day and it hadn't finish yet. He was ready to file a bug report somewhere, when we found out... If you click on the command prompt with the QuickEdit mode turned on, in a "wrong way", the underlying process will be frozen. It's because the input and output streams are blocked indefinitely, until you finish your selection and the content gets copied to the clipboard. So, why would you want to click on it? There is a common pattern people use for long running scripts: they push the window somewhere in the background, but leave a little space you can click on, so that you can view it very quickly. The "wrong way" of clicking is when you do click-drag instead of a point click. It goes automatically into the QuickEdit mode freezing everything underneath it.
eggy 11y ago
I still have the classic environment variables window and single line text boxes. Must be a setting somewhere... However, regarding the command prompt, I unchecked 'use legacy console' and now I can do much more. Transparency is something I am used to in Blender3D and Linux. Now with Ctrl-Shift-+ or -, I can vary the transparency!
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  The linked post notes that the new environment variables stuff is in the preview build 10565. I presume you'll only get that build if you select the Insider build channel. I'm still on the standard release build 10240 which still has the old environment settings box.

pmorici 11y ago

You can cut and paste from the command prompt if you go to properties and check the "Quick Edit Mode" option. It lets you highlight with the left mouse button and copy by simply clicking the right. w/o quick edit you first have to select 'Mark' from the context menu then you can highlight text to copy paste. It has worked this way as long as I can remember.

baddox 11y ago
And, bizarrely, the keyboard shortcut to copy marked text is Enter.
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  In Windows 10, you can use Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste. If they don't work, right click the command prompt titlebar, select Properties and then the Options tab, and turn on "Enable Ctrl key shortcuts". In this same properties page, you may also find "Enable line wrapping selection" and "Extended text selection keys" useful.
- userbinator 11y ago
  Because Ctrl+C was used for "interrupt" long before the concept of copy-paste came into being. Enter is often used to signify the positive end of an operation.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    If you enable the Ctrl shortcuts for clipboard operations, what shortcut do you use to stop a running process? Has one been made available?
    - ygra 11y ago
      How about Ctrl+C? The meaning is unambiguous: If there is a selection, Ctrl+C is handled by the console host and copies the selection. If there is no selection, Ctrl+C is passed on to the running program which then does whatever it likes with it (i.e. in many cases terminate itself).

ratsmack 11y ago

And there is nothing more awkward than trying to manipulate file ACL's in those tiny dialogues that you can't resize. I would think that it would be easy to fix the resize problem, but its almost as if they had some compelling reason keep them at a fixed size.

douche 11y ago
I've never understood that either. Those are just Win32 windows, right? So you change a window-style flag, and it should become resizable, right? I'm tempted to go mess around and see if I can hook into those windows with COM somehow and twiddle some bits... Maybe the rest of the dialog controls are all fixed dimensions and non-autosizable. Still, that seems like the kind of thing you could unleash a platoon of interns on and modernize, though.
- ygra 11y ago
  > Maybe the rest of the dialog controls are all fixed dimensions and non-autosizable. That's exactly the problem. Raw Win32 doesn't really have provisions for layouting containers and auto-resize behaviour. So you'd essentially have to handle WM_SIZE and reposition/resize all controls in the dialog. Such code is cumbersome to write, awkward to change and annoying to debug/test (e.g. you still need to check that you don't change something to negative sizes and/or constrain the window dimensions appropriately). And in the end you have a few hundred lines of code that are intricately linked to the current dialog layout and, in part, even replicate the layout. So you cannot even easily change the layout anymore. This is quite a bit of a cost associated with that. Inventing layout containers on the Win32 side seems a pointless idea as well, considering that nearly no one except Microsoft actually uses the API at that level, so improvements here have little benefit for lots of work. Most people most likely use wrappers around it that offer such things (e.g. Windows Forms), or things that take care of their own rendering and offer layout containers (WPF, Swing, GTK, Qt, ...). So I guess if MS offered the usual layout mechanisms in Win32 people would just shrug and ask »Why? I already have those things in the toolkit I use. Can't they devote development resources to actually important things?«.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Yeah, you can do that. It even does the sane thing with regard to lines.

douche 11y ago
No more rectangular console text selection? I've got to find a way to turn that on, I guess. My Win10 box is still doing the same old thing. Also, seriously, is there a way to get the console to reliably remember the size and layout settings between launches? At least half the time I launch something with a console window, it's smashed into a 80x25 window, with the ridiculously low 300 line scroll history.
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  For the text selection, see my other comment in this thread and turn on the "Enable line wrapping selection". For the command window size and scrollback buffer, I've always had good luck - in Windows 10 and older versions - by setting the options in the Layout tab of the command prompt property pages. I also use the Font tab to select Consolas. It is true that some programs that open their own command window don't follow these settings, but I usually open cmd.exe and go from there.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  If the command is lauched from a link, right click on it, click Properties, edit the config, hit OK.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Yeah, there's a word wrap selection setting in win10. For window size that's been easy to fix since forever. Just click the upper left corner icon and select either properties or defaults. Properties changes the settings for the shortcut if it was launched from one, defaults changes the settings for all cmd windows. In addition to window size and selection mode you can change the font and colors and whatnot.
- saratogacx 11y ago
  Hold down alt when making the selection and you'll select in block mode instead of line mode.

galago 11y ago

All of the comments here are useful. Thanks!

czwzmuwwwk 11y ago

Doesn't ConEmu allow for this?