6 ms·

I use a MBP at work and just bought a Surface Book 2 to use for side projects. It's everything I want a MBP to be, good battery life (you can go almost a full

I use a MBP at work and just bought a Surface Book 2 to use for side projects. It's everything I want a MBP to be, good battery life (you can go almost a full day on a single charge), a touch screen that works exceedingly well, and function keys that are...keys. Using the stylus also changes your workflow, instead of screen shotting, opening in preview, and annotating, you just kind of draw on the screen and share the image. Only major downside I've run into is that there do not seem to be any native terminals for Windows that even come close to rivaling iTerm 2. Cmdr is decent, but has some weirdness around colors and ligatures; Hyper is also decent, but has some rough edges. Suspect that'll change as more devs start needing decent *nix environments to develop on.

jamesgeck0 8y ago
The terminal situation will hopefully improve shortly; Microsoft just recently overhauled their console API with a backwards compatible API that behaves much closer to how *NIX works.
matthewaveryusa 8y ago
not native, and assuming you use the terminal to shell into other devices -- Have you used mobaxterm? I think it's pretty great
phowat 8y ago
I second this, I haven't found a Windows terminal that comes close to being as comfortable to use as iTerm, or even Terminal.app for that matter.
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  This is a bit of a terrible hack, but what I do is install an X server for Windows (I use VcXsrv, but there's a couple options), then from WSL launch Gnome terminal or whichever terminal emulator you like from Linux.
redacted 8y ago
Yeah, completely agree on my Surface Book being the MBP I wanted to buy Great hardware (including touchpad and keyboard), Win 10 and WSL have come a long way, and the touchscreen and stylus option became part of my workflow much quicker than I expected. Probably the best laptop I've ever owned, including the 2010-2015 era 15" MBPs. Regarding native terminals, I've had the best success with ConEmu set up to drop into WSL zsh by default. Easy to launch into cmd or powershell for Windows native stuff to boot.
newusertoday 8y ago
have you tried WSL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10? i found it quite usable
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  This is all I use. I highly recommend it.
nailer 8y ago
Also moved from Mac to Surface, 2 years ago. Used iterm2, which I believe is one of the highest quality pieces of software ever made. Before that gnome terminal pn various Linux OSs. I regularly check out ConEmu, Hyper, Alacritty, etc for their current state on Windows (cmder isn't a terminal, but it includes ConEmu which is). Most have major bugs - see https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/ https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/ for links to specific unresolved issues. The current most stable modern Windows Terminal is absolutely: Terminus. https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/ https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Hyper was almost unusable due to electron performance, how does Terminus hold against it?
  - nailer 8y ago
    I spend 10 hours a day in Terminus on a Pentium M and it's fine.
- kristiandupont 8y ago
  I might add vscode to this. You probably don't want it running solely as a terminal, but I've become used to it while developing and it's pretty nice on both Windows and Macos.
supernintendo 8y ago
ConEmu is pretty good - https://conemu.github.io https://conemu.github.io
mey 8y ago
Better terminals are coming to Windows. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/wind...
- ofrzeta 8y ago
  It's hilarious to see Microsoft educate their audience about things Unix and Linux users have take for granted for a long time. Like leaving their parallel universe after all those decades. Also interesting to see their jumping through hoops to get there.
  - mey 8y ago
    What's wrong with providing context and why the Windows system doesn't historically work the same way?
    - ofrzeta 8y ago
      Who said wrong? I think it's funny to see. Loosen up downvoters. It's not like Unix was hidden somewhere for the last 50 years. It's just that Windows users didn't seem to bother. For what it's worth the OS course at my former university did cover Unix and NT (based on the Stallings book).
zamalek 8y ago
I'm building a terminal for Windows, part terminal envy and part learning Direct2D. It's currently bloody fast, renders minimally (so battery-friendly), has ligature and color font support and works in remote sessions (read: where there isn't a GPU available). It isn't yet a terminal, though - I'm still working on the VT parser. Could you take a minute to put a "+1" emoji on, say, your top three features: https://github.com/jcdickinson/tv/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Ahn-vote+ https://github.com/jcdickinson/tv/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=la...
L0stLink 8y ago
That is about to change https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/1374#issuecomment-426688869 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/1374#issuecomment-42...

jamesgeck0 8y ago

The terminal situation will hopefully improve shortly; Microsoft just recently overhauled their console API with a backwards compatible API that behaves much closer to how *NIX works.

matthewaveryusa 8y ago

not native, and assuming you use the terminal to shell into other devices -- Have you used mobaxterm? I think it's pretty great

phowat 8y ago

I second this, I haven't found a Windows terminal that comes close to being as comfortable to use as iTerm, or even Terminal.app for that matter.

rhinoceraptor 8y ago
This is a bit of a terrible hack, but what I do is install an X server for Windows (I use VcXsrv, but there's a couple options), then from WSL launch Gnome terminal or whichever terminal emulator you like from Linux.

redacted 8y ago

Yeah, completely agree on my Surface Book being the MBP I wanted to buy Great hardware (including touchpad and keyboard), Win 10 and WSL have come a long way, and the touchscreen and stylus option became part of my workflow much quicker than I expected. Probably the best laptop I've ever owned, including the 2010-2015 era 15" MBPs. Regarding native terminals, I've had the best success with ConEmu set up to drop into WSL zsh by default. Easy to launch into cmd or powershell for Windows native stuff to boot.

newusertoday 8y ago

have you tried WSL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10? i found it quite usable

giancarlostoro 8y ago
This is all I use. I highly recommend it.

nailer 8y ago

Also moved from Mac to Surface, 2 years ago. Used iterm2, which I believe is one of the highest quality pieces of software ever made. Before that gnome terminal pn various Linux OSs. I regularly check out ConEmu, Hyper, Alacritty, etc for their current state on Windows (cmder isn't a terminal, but it includes ConEmu which is). Most have major bugs - see https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/ https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/ for links to specific unresolved issues. The current most stable modern Windows Terminal is absolutely: Terminus. https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/ https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/

wetpaws 8y ago
Hyper was almost unusable due to electron performance, how does Terminus hold against it?
- nailer 8y ago
  I spend 10 hours a day in Terminus on a Pentium M and it's fine.
kristiandupont 8y ago
I might add vscode to this. You probably don't want it running solely as a terminal, but I've become used to it while developing and it's pretty nice on both Windows and Macos.

supernintendo 8y ago

ConEmu is pretty good - https://conemu.github.io https://conemu.github.io

mey 8y ago

Better terminals are coming to Windows. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/wind...

ofrzeta 8y ago
It's hilarious to see Microsoft educate their audience about things Unix and Linux users have take for granted for a long time. Like leaving their parallel universe after all those decades. Also interesting to see their jumping through hoops to get there.
- mey 8y ago
  What's wrong with providing context and why the Windows system doesn't historically work the same way?
  - ofrzeta 8y ago
    Who said wrong? I think it's funny to see. Loosen up downvoters. It's not like Unix was hidden somewhere for the last 50 years. It's just that Windows users didn't seem to bother. For what it's worth the OS course at my former university did cover Unix and NT (based on the Stallings book).

zamalek 8y ago

I'm building a terminal for Windows, part terminal envy and part learning Direct2D. It's currently bloody fast, renders minimally (so battery-friendly), has ligature and color font support and works in remote sessions (read: where there isn't a GPU available). It isn't yet a terminal, though - I'm still working on the VT parser. Could you take a minute to put a "+1" emoji on, say, your top three features: https://github.com/jcdickinson/tv/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Ahn-vote+ https://github.com/jcdickinson/tv/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=la...

L0stLink 8y ago

That is about to change https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/1374#issuecomment-426688869 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/1374#issuecomment-42...