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Windows Terminal Source Code

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Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#91

Worth watching Casey Muratori's series of videos on terminals, and how to implement them, where he often makes specific comparison to Windows Terminal. He has some specific criticisms that are easy to disagree with, but the vast majority are well warranted. His broader series of videos on the topic are even worthwhile from a purely "software engineering education" standpoint. https://youtu.be/hxM8QmyZXtg I feel a bit…

I hope someone can take his demo and implement the idea for Windows Terminal. This would prove that such performance boost is indeed doable for a real world production level terminal.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what it once meant. "Spyware" was the term used for any process that called home regarding any information about you, your computer or your usage in the background. Calling home for anything other than "Check for updates" menu items or other actions where calling home was the explicit action the user wanted would get your name tarnished in the media and added to the signature list of software built for the so…

I don’t see why the makers of an app aren’t entitled to seeing how the app is used for the people who opt to use it. If I’m using windows terminal, I want them to know how often I use the hot keys, how often I split a terminal vertically then horizontally (alt-shift-d), etc. lest it be removed, since I know they don’t have infinite resources to dedicate to this single project to maintain every feature forever and eve…

> I don’t see why the makers of an app aren’t entitled to seeing how the app is used for the people who opt to use it. If I’m using windows terminal, I want them to know how often I use the hot keys, how often I split a terminal vertically then horizontally (alt-shift-d), etc. lest it be removed, since I know they don’t have infinite resources to dedicate to this single project to maintain every feature forever and ever.

The makers of an app are entitled to no more information about me and my use of it than I allow them to have. I think that it's reasonable to argue whether my allowance of sharing should be opt-in or opt-out, but I don't think that there is much scope for argument about whether I should be able to block the sharing of information if I choose explicitly to do so.

(One could argue that, as long as everything is disclosed up front, then the makers of an app have the right to demand whatever they want, and I have the right to accept their demands or else not to use their software. This is surely true in one sense; but, in another sense, it's exactly what the notion of "contract of adhesion" is meant to describe, and in many other contexts it's recognised as not a good thing.)

To the argument that the makers of app can use telemetry information to make their app better, I would say that that is doubtless true; but I would argue that is also true that I, and not they, have the right to decide where the boundary lies between my desire for privacy and their desire to improve their app. For example, perhaps—even likely—browser makers could make their browsers better if they knew exactly what sites I visited, but, if I found my browser reporting my history information back to Mozilla, then I would not say "ah well, as long as it makes for a better browser."

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just glancing through them it looks like perfectly reasonable telemetry collection, not sure why you call that spying.

It appears to be collecting information like the names of processes which are run. That is well beyond what I would consider acceptable. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/57c3953aca49f68ac...

I did some reading through the code to understand what was going on here. After a brief read, it appears that most of this telemetry code is only enabled when ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) is enabled.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/2b202ce6d99340401...

ETW is explicitly opt-in on windows and is almost exclusively used for debugging, not to mention it requires a kernel mode driver to be loaded.

https://nasbench.medium.com/a-primer-on-event-tracing-for-wi...

I have not read all the code, but from a brief overview this tracing behavior and telemetry wouldn't be automatically activated anywhere except on Azure.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#94
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are stating is incorrect. Each of the calls you link to sets a boolean here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/57c3953aca49f68ac... It does not transmit what you copy, search for or when you clicked/resized/closed the window. It simply stores a true/false value saying "feature X was used". In some cases, like with find/replace, it also stores the average length of things you searched for. That is a…

Every group implements their own telemetry. Every group goes through the same “learning process” of making it asynchronous and correctly dealing with proxies, firewalls, etc… Inevitably mistakes are made that either slow down computers or outright freeze apps that can’t connect to some telemetry endpoint. Security teams around the world feel like they’re holding back the tide with a broom because EVERY piece of softw…

Then don't use their app. They're entitled to do what they want with that under the law. If you don't like their choices then don't use it. I for one am appreciative they can get information that helps them plan the future of the program, but I also understand why some people don't like it. Those people shouldn't use it.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#95
post #34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some pretty detailed comments on many of them if you click through to their call sites, and more can be inferred from the file names of the callers. Let's take a look at `windowio.cpp` for example. This most-generic event fires every time you type any input character on the keyboard: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/57c3953aca49f68ac... It also has more-specific events for several different ways o…

I’m frankly shocked for the level of triviality of this code: and endless series of if/else while I’ve been stressing about reactive, typeclasses and whatnot for the past 5 years. And I frankly prefer the latter

Oh the irony. The people who write this code and the people who spread modern coding best practices are two separate sets of people. They sometimes overlap but rarely.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#96
post #38

Apple should follow MS's example and open source its Terminal.app It's a decent terminal emulator, but could use several enhancements and the community could help. For some reason I haven't changed to iTerm yet, even though it's been objectively better in every way for years. Even the minor gripe I had with font rendering is fixed. There's something about using default apps as much as possible that appeals to me. But…

> It's a decent terminal emulator, but could use several enhancements and the community could help. It's the only modern terminal that passes the VT torture test. It supports double width and double height characters (great for terminal error messages). It doesn't support overline (which is awesome for status lines at the bottom of the screen) and requires font support for line drawing and block graphics (Unicode 13…

Better keyboard only text selection, vertical/horizontal splits (I know about tmux, I still prefer scrolling and searching on true app), true color support, image visualizing would be nice.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#97

Apple should follow MS's example and open source its Terminal.app It's a decent terminal emulator, but could use several enhancements and the community could help. For some reason I haven't changed to iTerm yet, even though it's been objectively better in every way for years. Even the minor gripe I had with font rendering is fixed. There's something about using default apps as much as possible that appeals to me. But…

> Apple should follow MS's example and open source its Terminal.app This is bellyaching about nothing. Instead, Microsoft should follow Apple's example and open source the operating system . The only part of macOS that is not open source is the GUI, i.e. Quartz Compositor, and the gui applications. Microsoft, meanwhile, is an incredible slouch when it comes to open source, only very recently changing their hostile "e…

There’s orders of magnitude more closed source than open on macOS. But yeah, all software should be open source.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you wouldn’t. It is taking data you haven’t explicitly approved for release. Potential sensitive info. That is the definition of spying. You know most of what an actual spy collects isn’t super secret stuff right? Aggregated unclassified information can still reveal secrets.

What is sensitive about knowing some unidentifiable person clicked a button 10 times? Nothing. Nothing at all.

All that shows is a lack of imagination on your part.

It’s very easy to de-anonymize telemetry data, track users across IP addresses, collate with other application’s telemetry data, determine which users are in the same places at the same time, and generally extract a huge amount of data about people, who they spend time with, where they spend time, and what they do there.

Telemetry is unequivocally spyware.

It feeds a firehose of data to the internet, and both data brokers and state actors do absolutely everything they can to gobble it up.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#99
post #55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VT torture test?

I think rbanffy is referring to vttest[1], but I'm not certain. [1]: https://www.invisible-island.net/vttest/ EDIT to add: vttest is maintained by the current maintainer of xterm. It's the "torturiest" VT test I know of.

No. Not this one. It's too much work to test everything. A much more concise can be used from:

     curl -q http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/animation/vt100-animation/torturetest.vt
On a real terminal, you'll be able to see even the smooth scrolling function that AFAIK no windowed terminal implements.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just glancing through them it looks like perfectly reasonable telemetry collection, not sure why you call that spying.

Terminals should not be sending telemetry. Imagine if every .exe and every .dll did that! That's not OK!

How do they justify working on features if they don't know the users?

Asking for feedback doesn't work because that inflates the vocal minority.

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