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Inside the Windows Console

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

61–70 of 259 posts

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#61

I love Cmder, it's superior to cmd.exe in all possible ways, but from time to time it just stops working. Now I understand better why.

cmd is the shell, Cmder (which is just a wrapper around ConEmu) is the console/terminal. Both have little to do with each other, apart from that one needs the other to show a window.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#62

So, MS has finally realized they're 40 years behind the civilized world. I'm curious to see how long it will take them to catch up.

So, MS has finally realized they're 40 years behind the civilized world

Yes they should be emulating a teletype like enlightened folk!

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#63
post #43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried enabling QuickEdit mode in the Properties (right click on the titlebar)? Quick edit lets you use the mouse for selecting, and in Insider's releases we've even added support for Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy paste (even in wsl!). We've been working on not only tons of bugs, but adding plenty of new features, including support for VT sequences, 256/RGB color, improving our unicode support, enhanced accessibili…

> and in Insider's releases we've even added support for Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy paste (even in wsl!) Insider's release only? Wow, that sounds like really advanced stuff for something totally basic! > we've even added support for Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy paste So, you're from Microsoft, down voting everything that has the slightest touch of criticism? With the entire team maybe? You must be a very proud employee.

A user cannot downvote a reply. I also did not downvote you, but can understand you got downvoted because of your snarky reply. You are commenting on other people's work. If a feature is in the insider's release then it will be in a normal release in a few months.

So the comment is a "if you want to try it right now" kind of reply.

Also note that "why do I get downvoted" edits itself attracts more downvotes.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#64

The article seems to ignore the other big problem with the Windows console. It is painfully slow compare to Linux and Mac terminal programs. Especially when scrolling large amounts of text.

I regularly use both Windows and Linux, and I can't say that I've ever noticed a performance problem?

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#65
post #44

The article seems to ignore the other big problem with the Windows console. It is painfully slow compare to Linux and Mac terminal programs. Especially when scrolling large amounts of text.

Is that true for other UIs like conemu?

Good question. The article says that

> Alas, the story here is not a good one: There ARE some great 3rd party Consoles (and server apps) for Windows (e.g. ConEmu/Cmder, Console2/ConsoleZ, Hyper, Visual Studio Code, OpenSSH, etc.), but they have to jump through extraordinary hoops to act like a normal Console would!

> For example, 3rd party Consoles have to launch a Command-Line app off-screen at, for example, (-32000,-32000). They then have to send keystrokes to the off-screen Console, and screen-scrape the off-screen Console's text contents and re-draw them on their own UI!!

I'd guess that the third party emulators might perform worse, but someone need to test it empirically.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#66
post #25
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?

With the recent surge in MSFT, it must be pretty gratifying for the stock options.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#67
post #12
post #3

I'm not sure why the author is so excited! But it makes the article a bit difficult to read!

That's Rich for you - He's pretty passionate about everything we do :)

Thank you, love the series. Nothing wrong with the writing style.

Keep up the good work, it is great to see the console getting gradual improvements!

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#68
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this 30 years old code-base.. besides it is questionable only dev's below 30yr old are working on it (age discrimination, or accidental?), hardly anything changed. If I want to copy something I still have to do the ancient mark and copy sequence from the right click menu! What are they working on then? Still fixing bugs?

Have you tried enabling QuickEdit mode in the Properties (right click on the titlebar)? Quick edit lets you use the mouse for selecting, and in Insider's releases we've even added support for Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy paste (even in wsl!). We've been working on not only tons of bugs, but adding plenty of new features, including support for VT sequences, 256/RGB color, improving our unicode support, enhanced accessibili…

I just started turning Quick Edit off because I understood it was responsible for that strange bug where the console sometimes gets stuck until you press return. :-( Is that one on the to do list?

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#69
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this 30 years old code-base.. besides it is questionable only dev's below 30yr old are working on it (age discrimination, or accidental?), hardly anything changed. If I want to copy something I still have to do the ancient mark and copy sequence from the right click menu! What are they working on then? Still fixing bugs?

What about learning to use the OS? Quick edit for UNIX style copy-paste with the mouse goes all the way back to Windows 9X. The only issue is that it was always disabled by default, until they changed to be enabled by default with the latest set of changes. Spending a couple of seconds after logging in to enable it, for the very first time on a new system, was never a big deal.

Its not quite UNIX style - it works like a weird frame selection instead of follow the text LtR like any *nix console I can think of. It would be super if that could be fixed as well with an option.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#70
post #24

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.

cmd.exe is not getting any improvements, for better or for worse.

And Powershell Core (Powershell 6) is quite snappy. Try it out. They changed the name to pwsh.exe, you can have them in parallel in your PATH.

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