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Inside the Windows Console

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

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Re: Inside the Windows Console

#21

Post by gmueckl »

zadjii wrote: post #14
gmueckl wrote: post #11

So they have been working on uograding this since 2014? So far, the visible results seem a bit underwhelming for the invested time and effort. How big is the team? What am I missing here?

Well, the team is small, we're up to three whole devs now. Since 2014 we've been doing a lot of work o help bring our VT implementation up to par (to help enable WSL), as well as implementing new features such as 256/RGB color support, improved accessibility features, and we're even releasing a pty-like API for Windows. Not only that, but since the team was founded we discovered that conhost was not the only console…

Thank you for explaining! Please don't take my initial post as criticism of your work. There is just this visible disconnect between approximately 4 years of work and comparatively simple features that have been shown off so far. So there must be a story there.

I was not aware of Windows having had different console implementations in the past. Can you elaborate on that point? How did that come to pass?

Also,I am curious about one other thing: the Windows Console is notorious for having extremely bad perfomance when displaying lots of text. Last time I checked I could only get around 100 lines of text per second on Windows while Linux terminal emulations can show more than 10 times that amount. This may seem petty, but some programs are slowed down by this in practice. Can we expect improvements in that area as well?

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#22

Post by zerr »

> The Windows Console code-base is currently (July 2018) almost 30 years old ... older, in fact, than the developers who now work on it!

It smells like ageism... Did you lay off the original "old" devs?

EDIT: :)

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#23

Post by jhall1468 »

zerr wrote: post #22

> The Windows Console code-base is currently (July 2018) almost 30 years old ... older, in fact, than the developers who now work on it! It smells like ageism... Did you lay off the original "old" devs? EDIT: :)

I'm hoping this is a joke. Most developers don't stay at the same company on the same team for 30 years...

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#24

Post by m_st »

I tried using PowerShell or Hyper. But these are just so slow to start. So I'm always coming back to cmd.exe. It is fast and serves my basic needs just perfect.

When I need more, I just type 'bash'. And bash also starts faster than PowerShell or Hyper.

So I don't see why they now change WIN+X and Explorer to use PowerShell rather than cmd.exe.

Keep improving cmd.exe. But please don't make it bloated.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#25

Post by zadjii »

zerr wrote: post #22

> The Windows Console code-base is currently (July 2018) almost 30 years old ... older, in fact, than the developers who now work on it! It smells like ageism... Did you lay off the original "old" devs? EDIT: :)

Lol any original devs retired a long time ago, can you imagine what $MSFT shares from 1989 are worth now?

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#26

Post by PeCaN »

zerr wrote: post #22

> The Windows Console code-base is currently (July 2018) almost 30 years old ... older, in fact, than the developers who now work on it! It smells like ageism... Did you lay off the original "old" devs? EDIT: :)

Surely they have something better for developers with 30 years of experience to do than work on Windows Console.

It's, uh, not the only thing Microsoft works on.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#27

Post by dingo_bat »

gmueckl wrote: post #11

So they have been working on uograding this since 2014? So far, the visible results seem a bit underwhelming for the invested time and effort. How big is the team? What am I missing here?

Actually the cmd now is vastly improved over the one in win7. I cannot go back to that after using the latest one. The changes are definitely not underwhelming.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#28

Post by konstmonst »

zadjii wrote: post #13
Someone1234 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Powershell, but it still uses the exact same ConHost as cmd and command.com before it. When scripting PS this is a non-issue, but using it interactively remains painful.

May I ask what your specific pain points are? We've been doing a lot to try and improve our usability but there's so very much on our backlog that it's hard to prioritize. I'm always curious if people have specific requests edit: pain points with conhost*. I work on conhost, the "terminal", not PowerShell

Even on Windows I use mingw64 terminal + pacman. My pain points are:

- Conemu can show up on a shorcut, Windows Console can't - Windows Console doesn't have tabs - There is no CTRL + R to search for the last command

Ok maybe I've got more bash issues: - autocompletion in cmd doesn't work, not for commands nor for command arguments, like in Linux consoles - mc doesn't work in cmd

- I really hate dos batch language because it is not logical imho (I don't want to start to rant about it here). On the other hand I remember the bash language better and can write small one liners to create commands that don't natively exist. PowerShell is not an alternative because it treats everything as text and inserts new lines, where bash does not.

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