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Inside the Windows Console

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

71–80 of 259 posts

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#71
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bizarre to me. You simply can not attract developers to your platform without a first rate console experience. Why even bother with Powershell, Linux Subsystem etc without getting this crucial component working perfectly ?

Windows is the biggest, most popular development platform in the world. Are you not even slightly aware of the bias and bubble you live in?!

According to https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology-pl... Windows Desktop or Server takes second place with 35.4% of developers, behind Linux at 48.3%.

Apparently the roles were reversed in 2017, when Windows was a platform for 41% and Linux 32.9%: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-pl...

Of course that could all be biased by the demographic composition of StackOverflow users, but it still seems to indicate that Windows is losing importance.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#72
post #71
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is the biggest, most popular development platform in the world. Are you not even slightly aware of the bias and bubble you live in?!

According to https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology-pl... Windows Desktop or Server takes second place with 35.4% of developers, behind Linux at 48.3%. Apparently the roles were reversed in 2017, when Windows was a platform for 41% and Linux 32.9%: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-pl... Of course that could all be biased by the demographic composition of StackOverflow users…

It's probably biased. Your average enterprise or in-house dev is super, super likely to use Windows and he's not the kind of person that will respond to a poll.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#73
post #51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is the biggest, most popular development platform in the world. Are you not even slightly aware of the bias and bubble you live in?!

Which languages? Maybe for desktop app development (but that itself is quite a niche market now). I have yet to see a web developer use Windows. All I see are Macs and the occasional Linux.

Location is everything. Outside of the US Macs aren't as popular and enterprise or in-house web development rarely happens on Macs or God-forbid!* Linux.

* I'm kidding, but talk to your average IT department head about Linux desktops :)

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#74
post #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!

You mean you don't actually print your output?!? Heathen!

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#75
post #51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is the biggest, most popular development platform in the world. Are you not even slightly aware of the bias and bubble you live in?!

Which languages? Maybe for desktop app development (but that itself is quite a niche market now). I have yet to see a web developer use Windows. All I see are Macs and the occasional Linux.

Have you heard of C#? ASP.NET? A few of those devs use Windows...

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#76
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not the parent, but personally, my only real pet peeve with PowerShell as an IT admin is that the right click start menu replaced cmd with PowerShell despite it still being drastically slower to load on many PCs. There's a setting to change it back, but if you are working on other computers all the time, that's not useful at all. This is my main peeve with the Settings panel as well: It's slower to get things done wi…

> Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.

Security Questions are a really bad anti feature that nonetheless is really persistent. I don't need 5 more random alphanumeric Passwords in case I forget that other random alphanumeric password I can barely remember. In most places online where they are used the rip open huge security holes should you actually set reasonable a answer to "Whats my Pet called?".

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#77
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.

i'm not a microsoft employee, but i'm downvoting you because you're being a jerk.

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#78
post #69
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure it's block/column selection instead of line selection.

Why they made that design decision, we will never know. Maybe a dev was working with a lot of hex output? (even so, he should be slapped retroactively, unless he's Raymond Chen, cause Raymond Chen is amazing so we'll forgive his transgressions)

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#79
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Windows mostly because the console experience is so bad. I'm sure there are many others like me. Your superiors should realize they have lost generations of developers because of this and dedicate the resources needed to fix it. How they haven't realized this yet, astounds me.

Use mintty (or wsltty for WSL). It's slow but it's good. The Windows console really is rubbish, even after all these updates; don't bother with it.

Mintty + tmux. It's how I survive Windows. Also: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

Re: Inside the Windows Console

#80
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That bit you've quoted is only half the story. I've written both terminal emulators as well as ported my own UNIX shell to Windows and never resorted to those kind of tricks. However the stuff I've focused on isn't interactive commands (ie just normal POSIX-like file streams). The moment you envoke "del" or other command that prompts "Are you sure you want to delete" (or whatever) then for some odd reason Windows just jumps over that STDIN read request and ploughs through the rest of the program.

I can't say if this is a bug in my shell specifically or a wider problem that has lead to the work around you described, but it's literally the only problem left in my Windows port and I'm definitely not smarter than average nor have I spent any excessive time working in Windows so I cannot see how I might have solved problems that other shells are still grappling with given the limited time I've spent on the Windows specific portion of the code.

As for the bug itself, I get this is a pretty major bug which severally hampers the usability of the shell but I think given enough time (and a new development machine to test it one since I now longer have access to a Windows laptop after changing jobs) I could get this bug solved too. Hopefully without resorting to the kludge you described, but who knows.

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