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Introducing Windows Terminal
- ivalm 7y agoSo the main differentiator is a prettier terminal window relative to microsoft console?
- pixelbash 7y agoAnd apparently being able to add new features without "breaking the world"
- ivalm 7y agoBut even their own example was UI related, I wonder if this is just a way for them to fork "window console" to allow modern UI.
- i386 7y agoRaymond Chen had a good explanation for why the've been very hesitant to modernise cmd.exe but I can't seem to find it.
- heinrich5991 7y agoI'm interested in case you or someone else finds it. :)
- Insanity 7y agoIn this blogpost I found a possible reference to it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31383 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31... Saying "shipping a new command shell". Unfortunately the URL gives me a 403.
- fermentation 7y agoIs it me or does that last bit seem weirdly passive aggressive
- Insanity 7y agoThe last part of my comment? :O surely wasn't intentional if do :)
- Arnavion 7y ago>Saying "shipping a new command shell". Unfortunately the URL gives me a 403. The article is at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050909-24/?p=34263 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050909-24/?p=34... but the link is specifically to a comment that isn't preserved. At any rate it was probably just a comment where someone asked why MS can't ship a new command shell.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- laythea 7y agoWow, so much marketing voodoo for a text terminal!
- sudhirj 7y agoThat’s because the understand the value of developer mindshare. Billions on Github and they haven’t wrecked it (yet), Linux layers on Windows, .Net open sourced. The lack of nice terminal options (please don’t say ConEmu is nice, it’s functional, not the same thing) was certainly a factor. They’re chipping away at each little thing that holds devs away and making sure the world knows it.
- flukus 7y ago> They’re chipping away at each little thing that holds devs away and making sure the world knows it. It's worth keeping in mind why, it's to get developers interested in their proprietary platforms. These are the embrace and extend steps. Let me know when they switch to GPL licenses and can't pull the extinguish step.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoHow long till somebody goes through and ports it to Linux I wonder. Then Microsoft maintains the port turning it into the most powerful cross platform terminal emulator somehow. Also Mac please. But I am likely getting ahead of myself.
- flukus 7y agoWhy bother? Between tmux and much better window managers along with a myriad of terminal emulators this doesn't seem to offer much.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoWindows consoles have an obsolete architecture, it wouldn't make sense. Even this new app and subsystem components has to pull a lot of tricks to stay compatible with the old world.
- naikrovek 7y agoWell if you haven't heard, they have made the console MUCH more like a Unix terminal in terms of architecture. I think you may be referring to the old, awful, architecture.
- mixmastamyk 7y agohttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l... ConPTY may be pretty cool given the compatibility requirements but only a madman would port it to unix.
- code_duck 7y agoWho on earth would want that? People who have only ever used Microsoft products?
- giancarlostoro 7y agoPeople who want cross platform tooling like a cross platform editor
- president 7y agoWill content in the terminal re-render when the window is resized or will it be like Putty where only new content fills the whole window (annoying)?
- strmpnk 7y agoFrom a quick search on the repository, the answer seems to be yes, it does support reflow: https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=reflow https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...
- rb808 7y agoI did control-f resize and couldn't see anything in the article or video. I assume we can drag to resize, that is my only real wish.... they have to do it right?
- jitl 7y agoGiven that the existing terminals for Windows range from archaic (Console, PowerShell) to mediocre (ConEmu, Cmder), this move makes total sense. I’m excited to use the new terminal with WSL2 - maybe it will come close to iTerm2 with Docker.
- nailer 7y agoHyper, Terminus, Alacritty, and Fluent Terminal are all excellent. Also Powershell is a shell not a terminal and it's awesome.
- yboris 7y agoI'm a huge fan of Terminus for Windows (and I use Hyper on Mac) -- great alternatives to the usual: https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/ https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/
- rqqt 7y agoBTW Cmder IS ConEmu. Specifically it's CE set up with Git and Clink which is command completition. Last time I checked ConEmu still lacked horizontal scrolling, so it looks ugly when the text gets word wrapped.
- Nextgrid 7y agoLet me guess... there's gonna be telemetry in it?
- mynameisvlad 7y agoIt's open source, go find out yourself rather than guessing. https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal
- evv 7y agoEven in the worse case, people could fork it and distribute a telemetry-free version. Here is an example, a telemetry-free distribution of VSCode: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium Kudos to Microsoft for making the new Terminal open source (and here's hoping that it doesn't phone home with any private information!)
- PudgePacket 7y agoThat doesn't answer the question. There is no telemetry in the vscode codebase but it does get included for the release builds. Same with chromium/chrome.
- mynameisvlad 7y agoAs someone else replied, yes it does actually answer the question: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal/blob/master/src/terminal/parser/telemetry.cpp https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal/blob/master/src/termin...
- Nextgrid 7y agoMy question was rhetorical. The problem I’m trying to highlight is how the F is it ok for a terminal to be spying on you, and what kind of justification do they have for collecting this data (it’s not like there’s much useful info to collect here - it’s a terminal with very few features).
- 7y ago
- amanzi 7y agoThis looks great. I've tried many of the other terminal options on Windows (ConEmu, Cmdr, Hyper, etc) and none have been great and always found myself resorting back to the plain old command prompt.
- electrotype 7y agoI've used ConEmu a lot, now I use ConsoleZ on Windows. It's simple and it just works. https://github.com/cbucher/console https://github.com/cbucher/console
- sn_master 7y agoI used ConEmu for years. Splitting the console and tabs are awesome.
- spacenick88 7y agoAlacritty is pretty great, especially if you enable use of the new ConPTY API (needs Windows 19H1)
- Insanity 7y agoGood on them for making CMD more modern. But I'm not a fan of the ligatures they've shown in the video / screenshots. This was discussed on HN recently after this article got posted: https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon... Luckily, the font seems to just be an option and not something forced on you.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoCMD hasn't really been touched, though the console subsystem has, and now terminal-esq functionality debuts.
- sys_64738 7y agoI noticed DOSKey seems to be default in recent versions of command.com.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoCmd.exe you mean? Believe that functionality has been around for a while.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chokolad 7y agoThis is about terminal (think xterm, iterm2 etc.), not about shell like cmd or powershell or bash or zsh or whatever.
- Analemma_ 7y agoThe terminal adds support for ligatures, in the sense that the rendering capability is now there, but you can use a shell/editor without them.
- bloopernova 7y agoIs this different to the thread earlier today? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19840447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19840447
- paulddraper 7y agoThis is the original source.
- sys_64738 7y agoI have to hand it to Microsoft. WSL 2, Windows Terminal, and Edge based on Chromium. Microsoft really is doing some fantastic work for their users. Meanwhile, macOS will get new emojis in 10.15.
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoUIKit in macOS 10.15 too, so a bunch more Mac apps will be available to users.
- vlunkr 7y agomacOS already has a great terminal app. Microsoft is just playing catch up on really old features.
- mattigames 7y agoThe need was already satisfied by ConEmu (with clink) and similar terminal alternatives on Windows for people like me that care enough about these features; this is just Microsoft making it part of the core system for a more integrated experience under their control.
- sk5t 7y agoAs a previous user of ConEmu / Cmder I'd like to agree with you, but they are so inferior to a well set-up terminal+shell on Mac or Linux. I mean, without a great shell, what good is the terminal?
- mattigames 7y agoInstalling git-bash with the option of adding the linux utilities to the path is more than enough for me (so one gets linux-like grep, find, etc)
- johnnyballgame 7y agoHardly playing catch up here. They've much surpassed anything Apple has done in recent years, in both software AND hardware. Also, I don't recall macOS terminal being open source. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
- 781 7y agoFFS, why didn't they also provide a binary download? I don't want to download it and build it...
- naikrovek 7y agoBecause it isn't ready for general consumption, yet. Case in point: I compiled it quite easily and it crashes on launch. Not ready for widespread use, yet.
- nikbackm 7y agoMaybe it only works on the Windows Insider builds right now. Or it did not like your GPU. Hopefully it will also work on the Windows 10 LTSB builds when released.
- sterlind 7y agoMake sure you enable developer mode in the Windows Store settings, and then deploy the CascadiaPackage app (set as start-up project + F5 in VS, not sure off-hand how to do it from the command prompt.) That fixed it for me.
- modzu 7y agoits interesting how long its taking for MS to do command-line well and linux to do the gui well. after decades you would think each could be considered a solved problem, at least given that they are solved by their respective OSes, yet there has not been the convergence you might expect
- chokolad 7y agoAnd here is MIT-licensed source code for it https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
- HocusLocus 7y agoTHAT https://giphy.com/gifs/cheer-cheering-11sBLVxNs7v6WA https://giphy.com/gifs/cheer-cheering-11sBLVxNs7v6WA Why is no one discussing THAT?? What a world, what a world!
- m1keil 7y agoHappy to see it's not another Electron based terminal
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- secondtruck 7y agotransparency at last -- i hope its customizable
- halotrope 7y agoThis is great. I recently shifted to woking more with windows/WSL after much frustration with mac. However the terminal experience was not great. The electron based options where not fast enough, default WSL shell was comparably fast to iTerm but did not even have basic tabs. Microsoft is really doing a lot of good and exciting stuff nowadays.
- 10eleven 7y agoGreat! Now if we could just switch the path separator over to /
- BasicObject 7y agoLet's make that a setting and call it a day. Seems easy enough?
- xenadu02 7y agoA bunch of early Microsoft folks were also Unix users and preferred using / as a directory separator but IBM insisted on using / for command-line switches, forcing use of \ as the separator. This was a late-breaking change and for a few versions of DOS you could set SWITCHAR=- in CONFIG.SYS to get the Unix behavior. When set "dir /s C:\whatever" becomes "dir -s c:/whatever". You can literally blame IBM for this divergence. Without them pitching a fit about it DOS/Windows would have had the same switch syntax and path separators as Unix.
- nailer 7y agoYou can type / and it works in Powershell. I've been using Unix for 20 years, switch to pwsh 2 years ago, never typed backslash ever.
- 10eleven 7y agoWHAT
- 10eleven 7y agoThis changes everything
- eBombzor 7y agoPowershell is considerably slower than cmd. Does that not bother you?
- majkinetor 7y ago
- netheril96 7y agoSo, UTF-8 support?
- kbumsik 7y agoPresumably. They announced they are working on UTF-8 support last year while building a new TTY-ish subsystem. [1] So their work will likely land to the new terminal. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-unicode-and-utf-8-output-text-buffer/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...
- sterlind 7y agoYup! I just tested it, and Terminal displayed my utf8 correctly in neovim, while it was broken (OEM447 or whatever) in cmd.exe
- SyneRyder 7y agoIf someone wants an app idea (which might now be possible since Windows Terminal is open source & DirectX based)... I've been looking for a Windows replacement to Cathode [1], a macOS app that makes the terminal look like a CRT monitor. Not just the colour scheme & font, but with screen jitter, image persistence & glow, static, scanlines and even sound effects sampled from old computers. For the times I have to use a terminal, it really makes me smile & enjoy the work. Linux has Cool Retro Term which is similar, and there have been efforts to port that to Windows that have failed. I could probably run Cool Retro Term under WSL2, but Windows deserves something native. It seems more likely that an indie developer might be able to fork Terminal & create their own than Microsoft building this in. (As much as I like the idea of Windows having a Fruity IIe terminal theme built-in.) Cathode charges $5 which is much too cheap - I'd pay $20 easily (maybe more) for something that brightens up my work day the way Cathode does. [1] http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- eBombzor 7y agoTrying to build from it requires VS + 16GB of build tools... what in the world.
- crispinb 7y agoI think you can install msbuild + tools without VS. No doubt still pretty big though. More than I can be arsed with just for this purpose. Will have to wait for the release.
- solarkraft 7y agoThey really need to step up their VS-less developer tools (which mostly means packaging & documentation).
- tanseydavid 7y agoAlso requires WIN10 SDK to build.
- klemola 7y agoI haven't seen Alacritty mentioned yet as an existing alternative for built-in terminals. It's modern, configurable and really fast (thanks to GPU acceleration and possibly Rust). I've enjoyed using it with W10 native OpenSSH. https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty
- nailer 7y agoNo tabs though (deliberately). You'll need to add a tabbing window manager to add them.
- solarkraft 7y agoWhat tabbing Window managers are there for Windows? In terms of desktop replacements I only know Cairo (but that doesn't touch windows).
- solarkraft 7y agoEveryone who wants this but prefers not downloading 16 Gigabytes of Visual Studio to build this should have a look at Fluent Terminal [1], which can be installed through chocolatey and in my opinion even looks a little better (might not have all of the features, though). I've been using it for a while and have been very happy with it and have for all that time wished that they would just adopt it as a default app. Oh look :-) [1]: https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal
- dingo_bat 7y agoOMG did anybody look at that video?! It's like the marketing video for a new iphone. Never thought I'd see such a video for a terminal program!
- cmarschner 7y agoThe real question is - can it display videos using sixel?
- jonhendry18 7y agoDoes anyone know if the default cut/copy/paste key equivalents in Windows Terminal are ctrl-x/ctrl-c/ctrl-v like everything else in Windows, or is it still that weird system from CMD.EXE which is an abomination unto Nuggan? I haven't been able to find this out. I even tweeted at someone on the Windows Terminal team and didn't get a response. EDIT: I looked through the github repo and it does appear to support sane key equivalents. Nuggan be praised!