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It seems weird to me that conhost.exe handles how console commands are displayed. I've read where some 3rd party attempts to improve the terminal experience on
by Touche 11y ago
It seems weird to me that conhost.exe handles how console commands are displayed. I've read where some 3rd party attempts to improve the terminal experience on Windows have done so by essentially scraping what conhost outputs and then using the data to display output themselves.
Am I wrong about this? I have never worked on terminals so I very well could be, but my expectation would be that terminals call into shell APIs which return a result that the terminal can then display however it wishes. If so, then I think the next natural step would be for Windows to decouple conhost's responsibilities.
- Analemma_ 11y agoThis isn't as necessary as it used to be: conhost.exe got a major overhaul in Windows 10 and it sucks a lot less now. There's wrapped selection, copy/paste, and transparency (if you're into that). There's plenty more to go but overall the experience is no longer pull-your-hair-out agony, and Microsoft did say (without providing any specifics) that more improvements were on the way and that they are still soliciting feedback and feature suggestions. You could propose changing the way commands are displayed if you wanted.
- Touche 11y agoThose improvements are nice, but ultimately 3rd party terminals should be able to handle display completely by themselves. Is this now possible?
- jandrese 11y agoFrom what I understand, it used to run at way too low a level in the kernel for some reason, so third parties couldn't touch it. This was fixed in Win10 so alternative shells are now possible.