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One of the reasons the "terminal" (the old console subsystem) stagnated in Windows for so long was that they assigned ownership of it to the same team that owne
by 13of40 4y ago
One of the reasons the "terminal" (the old console subsystem) stagnated in Windows for so long was that they assigned ownership of it to the same team that owned Explorer (the local one, not IE) and for basically every release up to Windows 8.1 they weren't able to get any budget to improve it. It wasn't until then that people started to realize that the console wasn't just a relic from the past that we would eventually shed, but something that played a serious role in software engineering and IT.
- hamburglar 4y agoOne of the silly limitations it had as a result of this neglect was that it was impossible to run cmd.exe with an arbitrary set of foreground and background colors because it was limited to using a set of 7 unique color schemes stored in the registry. I used to (like 15 years ago) have a hack script for this called colorcmd that would take the fg and bg color hex as arguments. The dirty trick was that the registry keys for the color sets were named for the actual executable that was being run, and I would just make a symlink to cmd.exe called eg colorcmd_RRGGBB_RRGGBB.exe (with the actual rgb hex), create the registry entries for it, then run that exe. Now it seems odd to me to even want many different colors of console (I used to use them for differentiating purpose or project) but that was a fun little workaround at the time.