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What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

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Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#91

Post by snarfy »

nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

But a third party must create an entire console just for tabs, due to /subsystem:console

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fcc1zstk.aspx

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#92

Post by CJefferson »

finchisko wrote: post #81
hackpert wrote: post #71

This is brilliant. I might actually consider switching to Windows now. Both Arch and macOS have been getting on my nerves lately.

Switching from Arch (linux) to emulated linux (ubuntu) under Windows makes lot of sense. :-)

On my laptop, bash on windows gives me better battery life and working sleep/wake, compared to "real" Ubuntu.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#93

Post by neilsimp1 »

nailer wrote: post #87
uaaa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a more modern wrapper around ConEmu: http://cmder.net

Cmder is ConEmu, just with a bunch of other stuff added to the download, including: - Something called 'git-for-windows' which isn't actually git for Windows https://git-scm.com/download/win but unremarkable things like shell additions which give you git status in the prompt, and a not-particularly-good GUI. - Clink (which is for cmd.exe). I.e., this doesn't in any way address the limitations mentioned in the post yo…

Doesn't it, though? It lets you create tabs, Ctrl+c - Ctrl+v, and works for Cmd, PowerShell, and Bash on Windows.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#94

Post by sratner »

xienze wrote: post #12

Only thing I wish they could do is make calling Linux programs from Windows a bit more natural. Yeah "bash -c" works, but it's not exactly ideal.

You could always:

    C:\> doskey ls=bash.exe -c "ls $*"

    C:\> ls /
    bin   cache  dev  home  lib    media  opt   root  sbin  srv  tmp  var
    boot  data   etc  init  lib64  mnt    proc  run   snap  sys  usr

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#95

Post by Const-me »

laumars wrote: post #20
aerovistae wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft adds this amazing set of features and the only response you have is "your name is insulting the people you're trying to appeal to"? "Trying"? As if they're failing? Do you know how much people love this project?

A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. Microsoft have done a lot over the years to troll the Linux community. While many of the younger HN members will be familiar with the "new open source Microsoft" some of us oldies have had to endure IE breaking the web plus ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins. Comments like "open source is communism" from top…

> IE breaking the web

For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest.

> ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins

Everybody did that. Have you forgot internet with A/V streaming locked to RealNetworks, and vector graphics and animation locked to Macromedia?

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#96

Post by Svenskunganka »

nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

Mintty is what I'm using for it. You don't have to install the entirety of Cygwin and its unix-like tools to use it, there's smaller bundles specifically made for WSL like this one: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

I personally don't want a terminal with built-in tabs or windows since I use tmux for that. On my Mac I use iTerm2 where tabs/windowing is integrated with tmux. Try it and see if you like it! :)

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#97

Post by barrkel »

laumars wrote: post #88
oblio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been using Cygwin for 10 years now. It's a bit annoying to install and update it, but it's far from a nightmare :) Just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it. To update package, just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it :) Or use this: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg (I haven't needed so far, but I've read good reviews about it) Regardin…

We can argue about whether "nightmare" is overstating the problem but let's be honest that it's easily more than just "a bit annoying". The installer took an hour on one system and the options in those 5-10 pages are far from user friendly. Sure it's stuff I can manage being a seasoned Linux sysadmin but frankly I've found installing ArchLinux (with it's deliberately anti-user approach) easier; never mind your more "…

For problematic processes, I use kill -W -- that uses the TerminateProcess Win32 API, rather than Cygwin's POSIX implementation. I also use it to kill things like the Windows Update full-screen overlay on Windows 10.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#98

Post by ygra »

nunez wrote: post #85

WOW. cmd can actually parse escape codes now AND run Linux scripts! What a time to be alive. I've been using WSL for the last year now on my Surface Pro 4, and it has been nothing short of fantastic. This bridges a HUGE gap that made the MacBook attractive.

cmd has nothing to do with it. Just as bash has nothing to do with parsing terminal escape sequences. It's a shell. On Unix-likes a terminal or ~ emulator will handle those escape sequences, on Windows it's the console (provided by conhost). What program you run in the console (or terminal) is completely irrelevant.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#99

Post by laumars »

badminton1 wrote: post #89
laumars wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone you're replying to understands how WSL and UNIX shells work. The error is on your part because you keep misunderstanding that the Windows executable one runs to invoke WSL is literally C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe Sure, once you've started bash you can then probably switch to whichever shell you want afterwards (NOTE: I say that but I've not tested to see if other shells work). But to use your WINE example,…

When I say bash, I am referring to GNU bash, the shell that has existed for decades now on Linux, BSD, macOS, Solaris and an endless list of other operating systems. I do not care if Microsoft couples their ABI and the shell and decides to call that "bash". GNU bash will continue to be what it has been for decades now. I also do not care if a lot of people want to take the entire GNU/Linux userland and decide to call…

bash.exe on Windows is also GNU Bash:

    C:\Users\laumars>bash --version
    GNU bash, version 4.3.11(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
    Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 

    This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
The rest of the subsystem isn't called "bash", it's called "Windows System for Linux". It just happens that bash.exe on Windows contains the WSL hooks rather than being a straight port of GNU Bash.

Frankly bash across Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris will differ anyway due to differences in the way PTYs are registered, variations in supported signals and different syscalls (all issues I've ran into when writing my own cross-platform Linux/Unix shell by the way). So you'll find hundreds of compile-time conditions defined in Bash's source code which alter the behaviour of the outputted ELF (and I don't just mean your typical libc linker differences). So MS and Canonical integrating the WSL hooks into bash.exe isn't massively different enough for your argument to stand.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#100

Post by nostoc »

nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

Tmux solves your tab needs!
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