This is very exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
11–20 of 196 posts
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#12Hey I'm one of the Console devs who's been working on this feature for a while now. I'll be hanging around in the comments for a little while to try and answer any questions that people might have. TL;DR of this announcement: We've added a new pseudoconsole feature to the Windows Console that will the people create "Terminal" applications on Windows very similarly to how they work on *nix. Terminals will be able to i…
Have you given thought on how to solve the "unwanted console" problem? For example if you run a .py file (Python) under Windows then you get a console. That is fine for command line stuff, but beyond annoying if the file displays as a gui. So there are now two Python binaries - python.exe and pythonw.exe. The only difference is the latter ensures no console appears. Also good luck if the script printed a help message since often the console disappears before you even know that happened.
I presume many tools deal with this issue, and do it in different ways. Perhaps it is as simple as making the console itself only appear once there is any output, or a blocking read of input.
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#13What next? Job control signals?? :) (EDIT: How about tmux?)
Anyways, this is fantastic. Finally, proper ssh functionality!
This will encourage development of console (text-oriented) apps for Windows, which I hope will be much simpler. Interfacing with the console can be really difficult if you're coming from *nix. Ideally all the WIN32-specific code in, e.g., jq[0], could be ripped out.
[0] https://github.com/stedolan/jq (look in src/main.c)
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#14Hey I'm one of the Console devs who's been working on this feature for a while now. I'll be hanging around in the comments for a little while to try and answer any questions that people might have. TL;DR of this announcement: We've added a new pseudoconsole feature to the Windows Console that will the people create "Terminal" applications on Windows very similarly to how they work on *nix. Terminals will be able to i…
While it is nice that MS is focusing on console and command line now, it seems to me that you are mostly working on improving compatibility with legacy UNIXy stuff. Do you have some vision or plans to go well beyond the classic UNIXy style of console and command line? I'm thinking in the lines of projects like DomTerm http://domterm.org/ which could have nice interactions with e.g. PowerShell.
The ConPTY is not just about compatibility with nix. It's about proper remoting of consoles. Unix got that right / Windows got that wrong, and now Windows will finally get it right too -- that it helps nix compat seems like a happy accident (though obviously they want that too, so not so accidental.
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zadji I love your work. Which build is this going to land in? Do you know if any of the third party console apps using the new API yet?
It's already available in current insider's builds, and will be landing officially in the next available Windows release some time later this year. We're still working with ConEmu, VsCode, and OpenSSH to get them all over to the new API, with varying levels of adoption in the next few months likely. Currently, WSL is also using the same functionality, if you open a WSL distro and run any Windows executables (eg `cmd.…
Out of curiosity, are you backporting onto Windows 10, or is Windows 10 the only release vehicle for everything in master? If the latter, how are you releasing piecemeal?
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#16Hey I'm one of the Console devs who's been working on this feature for a while now. I'll be hanging around in the comments for a little while to try and answer any questions that people might have. TL;DR of this announcement: We've added a new pseudoconsole feature to the Windows Console that will the people create "Terminal" applications on Windows very similarly to how they work on *nix. Terminals will be able to i…
While it is nice that MS is focusing on console and command line now, it seems to me that you are mostly working on improving compatibility with legacy UNIXy stuff. Do you have some vision or plans to go well beyond the classic UNIXy style of console and command line? I'm thinking in the lines of projects like DomTerm http://domterm.org/ which could have nice interactions with e.g. PowerShell.
PM for PowerShell here!
I haven't seen DomTerm before, but it looks pretty awesome. At a glance, it's basically a GUI-fied tmux hosted in Electron? It would be awesome to have in Windows, but wouldn't that just require that DomTerm add support for these ConPty APIs?
In any case, I'm more interested in your proposed interactions. Did you have anything cool in mind? Given that we ship PowerShell on Linux, we could theoretically do some stuff there (including within PowerShell on WSL) before it's hooked up to ConPty
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#17Hey I'm one of the Console devs who's been working on this feature for a while now. I'll be hanging around in the comments for a little while to try and answer any questions that people might have. TL;DR of this announcement: We've added a new pseudoconsole feature to the Windows Console that will the people create "Terminal" applications on Windows very similarly to how they work on *nix. Terminals will be able to i…
Will there be the ability to disown, background, nohup processes and close the console, leaving the commands running?
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#18If I use the System.Process API in .NET and redirect the Stdin/Stdout to a stream inside my application, does the framework spawn an invisible console and scrape the output? Or does this work differently? I always did it that way and thought the 3rd party terminal emulators also do that. Why do these emulators have to do it differently?
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#19Finally! I've been waiting ten years or so for this API. It's about time that alternative terminal emulation becomes possible on Windows.
Re: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPty)
#20If I use the System.Process API in .NET and redirect the Stdin/Stdout to a stream inside my application, does the framework spawn an invisible console and scrape the output? Or does this work differently? I always did it that way and thought the 3rd party terminal emulators also do that. Why do these emulators have to do it differently?
That API is using pipes.