4 ms·

Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot a

Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.

tasogare 5y ago
Windows terminal is a shit show. The dev blogs posts are all about useless features such as image background while fundamentals like unicode input are still broken.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  Like Windows Notepad. I suspect it was never designed for anything more than trivial cases, and then it never got requirements overhaul later in subsequent versions of Windows.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.
    - dagw 5y ago
      Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet). Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows terminal".
      - thriftwy 5y ago
        Corporate practices are to blame here also, where instead of improving the existing solution, a new project is launched, which often carries nothing from the previous one. Then the public will conflate two products, and some will avoid the new one not knowing if it's here to stay (another corporate antipattern).
        zadjii 5y ago
        Actually, the Windows Terminal shares a lot of its codebase with the Windows Console. The buffer, the VT parser, the renderer interface, most of the UIA implementation - that's all the same code. Improvements here to the Terminal actually help conhost.exe as well. The UI of the Terminal is what's new, because trying to iterate on the legacy UI of conhost.exe was simply not maintainable.
      - zadjii 5y ago
        And see, even you've done it here. Command Prompt is `cmd.exe`, which is different from PowerShell (`powershell.exe`), and both of those are different still from `conhost.exe`, which is the actual console window itself. cmd and powershell are "shells", which both need to run in a console, and conhost.exe is that console (which is the "terminal window" for these applications). More reading: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md#shell-vs-terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md... Conhost is the window that's had updates all throughout Windows 10. It's responsible for both the console subsystem, and the console UI. The UI though is the part that's largely being replaced by the Terminal. Conhost will never go away, but the Terminal is where all the action is these days. (It's also shipping with Windows 11 by default)
- fellellor 5y ago
  My mouse would start lagging whenever I “moused” over an active Windows terminal window, in spite of running a brand new system with a 3070 GPU etc. Did they ever manage to fix that?
  - zadjii 5y ago
    That's probably some combo of: * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/649#issuecomment-918301563 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/649#issuecommen... * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11230#issuecomment-921279806 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11230#issuecomm...
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
Yeah, that’s another problem, the software industry as a whole is horrendously bad at getting requirements right.
zadjii 5y ago
TBF we've actually maintained the Windows Console for the better part of 5 years and we're incredibly passionate about performance. We live and breath in the commandline. Performance has always been one of our P1 priorities, because improvements to the console have second-order impacts on the entire commandline ecosystem. There is an engineering tradeoff though - we've only got so many devs and at a certain point you have to say "good enough for now, we'll come back to this, let's go do this other thing for now". The Terminal is faster than conhost was, and that's a good place to start, but I don't think anyone things we're done working on the Terminal, and we're certainly not done working on its perf ;)

tasogare 5y ago

Windows terminal is a shit show. The dev blogs posts are all about useless features such as image background while fundamentals like unicode input are still broken.

thriftwy 5y ago
Like Windows Notepad. I suspect it was never designed for anything more than trivial cases, and then it never got requirements overhaul later in subsequent versions of Windows.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.
  - dagw 5y ago
    Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet). Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows terminal".
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      Corporate practices are to blame here also, where instead of improving the existing solution, a new project is launched, which often carries nothing from the previous one. Then the public will conflate two products, and some will avoid the new one not knowing if it's here to stay (another corporate antipattern).
      - zadjii 5y ago
        Actually, the Windows Terminal shares a lot of its codebase with the Windows Console. The buffer, the VT parser, the renderer interface, most of the UIA implementation - that's all the same code. Improvements here to the Terminal actually help conhost.exe as well. The UI of the Terminal is what's new, because trying to iterate on the legacy UI of conhost.exe was simply not maintainable.
    - zadjii 5y ago
      And see, even you've done it here. Command Prompt is `cmd.exe`, which is different from PowerShell (`powershell.exe`), and both of those are different still from `conhost.exe`, which is the actual console window itself. cmd and powershell are "shells", which both need to run in a console, and conhost.exe is that console (which is the "terminal window" for these applications). More reading: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md#shell-vs-terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md... Conhost is the window that's had updates all throughout Windows 10. It's responsible for both the console subsystem, and the console UI. The UI though is the part that's largely being replaced by the Terminal. Conhost will never go away, but the Terminal is where all the action is these days. (It's also shipping with Windows 11 by default)
fellellor 5y ago
My mouse would start lagging whenever I “moused” over an active Windows terminal window, in spite of running a brand new system with a 3070 GPU etc. Did they ever manage to fix that?
- zadjii 5y ago
  That's probably some combo of: * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/649#issuecomment-918301563 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/649#issuecommen... * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11230#issuecomment-921279806 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11230#issuecomm...

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

Yeah, that’s another problem, the software industry as a whole is horrendously bad at getting requirements right.

zadjii 5y ago

TBF we've actually maintained the Windows Console for the better part of 5 years and we're incredibly passionate about performance. We live and breath in the commandline. Performance has always been one of our P1 priorities, because improvements to the console have second-order impacts on the entire commandline ecosystem. There is an engineering tradeoff though - we've only got so many devs and at a certain point you have to say "good enough for now, we'll come back to this, let's go do this other thing for now". The Terminal is faster than conhost was, and that's a good place to start, but I don't think anyone things we're done working on the Terminal, and we're certainly not done working on its perf ;)