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I've used iTerm and Terminal on Mac, and the default Windows Terminal (conhost), PuTTY sand MinTTY on Windows. Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost,
by nneonneo 10y ago
I've used iTerm and Terminal on Mac, and the default Windows Terminal (conhost), PuTTY sand MinTTY on Windows.
Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost, even after the Windows 10 update. It's fast, supports a ton of thoughtful features (such as customizable title bars via extended ANSI codes, real line wrapping during resize, good Unicode support from the very beginning, etc.). With Terminal.app I can be quite happy and productive even with someone else's Mac or with the default settings. I've used iTerm2 but their features weren't compelling enough for me, and the iTerm font rendering is noticeably worse in many ways. Apple has also been very good about giving Terminal.app continuous updates.
On Windows though I have almost always had to install MinTTY or something just to get a halfway usable terminal emulator. The default emulator is just so limited - Unicode support is very plug and pray, the title bar is totally locked, and having to use Windows APIs to change text formatting is a pain. Conhost is also amazingly slow when it comes to large amounts of text, so much so that printf can be extremely detrimental to program performance just because it has to wait for the terminal window to catch up.
PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions. That means that in practice I often pop open cmd.exe even if PS is a better choice, just because I don't want to sit through a long load time.
Microsoft really should get their Terminal story in order. I'll definitely try out ConEmu the next time I sit in front of a Windows box, but like you I wish MS would improve their own apps!
- bitwize 10y ago> PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions. Small price to pay to be able to pipe objects, man!
- throwaway7645 10y agoAre you actually able to not be confused by piping objects? In Unix everything is a string so I just pipe text to sort and then unique...etc. PS always complains relentlessly. The GUI features and .NET integration is nice though.
- JeffreySnover 10y agoSorry about that - we lost control of our startup times in PS V3 and have been working to get it back under control. PowerShell V5 had substantial improvements but we keep working on it and V5.1 is even faster. Give it a try - I think you'll like it. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
- Bombthecat 10y agoI really hope so! I basically stopped using ps ( for smaller stuff) because the startup tone is so awful.
- nneonneo 10y agoI'm not entirely sure if you're joking or not (one of the hazards of the textual communication medium). Yes, piping objects is fun and occasionally very useful, but waiting ten seconds to pop a terminal so I can run `ipconfig` or something is not so useful.
- brownbat 10y ago> good Unicode support from the very beginning I once started a Chinese character flash card program in Python on Windows. The yak shaving was unbelievable. I never got a working version, but I learned a lot about code pages, and why "building a console from scratch" is not actually the right answer to "I want to be able to test a toy program I'm making before it's finished."
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoTkinter would have given you a basic Unicode capable GUI without the hassles of the console.
- brownbat 10y agoHmm, going back through my old .py files, I ultimately did start using Tkinter... and for some reason thought yaml was really important... Still, would have been nice to have a program that essentially took in and put out text without learning everything about GUI elements. I'd never written anything with a GUI before, and "I'd like to see unicode" is a really weird place to dive in.
- hota_mazi 10y agoWhat drove me away from Terminal.app was the fact that I can't use command-1/2/3 to switch tabs. Ctrl-tab doesn't work either. Did I miss something?
- thebspatrol 10y agoCMD + { and CMD + }
- skissane 10y agoI wonder why they chose ⌘{ and ⌘} instead of ⌘[ and ⌘]. With the later you don't need to hold down SHIFT (at least on US keyboard layout.)
- eridius 10y agoBecause it's the same keyboard shortcuts that Safari uses, and in Safari ⌘[ and ⌘] navigate the history stack.
- hota_mazi 10y agoThanks but... yuck. Any way I can remap these? Cmd-<number> is a pretty standard way to jump to tabs (and arguably, Ctrl-tab as well).
- eridius 10y ago⌃⇥ actually does work in Terminal.app. And in fact, ⌃⇥ and ⌃⇧⇥ are the official keyboard shortcuts in the menu, with ⌘{ and ⌘} being undocumented aliases. This is also how Safari works too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]