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Reimagining the Windows Command Line

tltjr.github.com

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#11
One of my biggest pet peeves about the original "cmd.exe" or PowerShell is that resizing the window is not pixel-precise. Thank you for making this a part of wish! The snapping to the left and right of my screen works really well.

Although it seems it is not working well on Windows 8 x64, I am having a good experience on Windows 7 x64.

A couple of suggestions:

- Wish takes a while to become responsive after starting the program (3-4 seconds for me). I am not sure if this is just me, I just wanted to make you aware!

- Add a keystroke for clearing the terminal. I am addicted to Ctrl + L in bash.

- Perhaps consider adding select to copy.

Keep up the good work, and I'll keep an eye on this project :).

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#12
post #8

Nice work! I played with it for a bit and one thing I noticed was that the "Home" key took me to the beginning of the line/prompt instead of the start of my input. Also if I backspace far enough it will start to kill my prompt. One thing that would make this awesome for me is emacs keybindings. Overall though, I think this has nice potential to be a super useful tool. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the feedback. The UI is a bit of a hack for the prototype and will be a more proper control for release. Emacs and vim keybindings are on my feature list. I think Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N work for command history in the prototype, but don't quote me on that.

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#13

One of my biggest pet peeves about the original "cmd.exe" or PowerShell is that resizing the window is not pixel-precise. Thank you for making this a part of wish! The snapping to the left and right of my screen works really well. Although it seems it is not working well on Windows 8 x64, I am having a good experience on Windows 7 x64. A couple of suggestions: - Wish takes a while to become responsive after starting…

All great suggestions, thanks! I'll take a look at all these.

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#14
post #6

Windows is a dead OS walking. My humble advice is instead of learning Wish, get a Linux VM and start moving your skillset, aps, ets.

Check your facts, for example here: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp.

See, your 'dead OS' is not walking - it is marching bravely here and there and all over the planet, led by army of Windows admins. Who, being just as smart as their other-OS-admin-brothers, are always looking for better tools to do their job.

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#15
post #9

When I work on windows, I just use cygwin with the mintty shell to get productive with a familiar look&feel. What am I missing with this setup that Wish fills?

A lot of Windows users (like myself) are somewhat committed to tools like Powershell in addition to Cygwin. I currently keep both Git Bash and Powershell open so I can switch back and forth as needed. Wish allows me to switch between these seemlessly with a common set of features across both.

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#16
post #12
post #8

Nice work! I played with it for a bit and one thing I noticed was that the "Home" key took me to the beginning of the line/prompt instead of the start of my input. Also if I backspace far enough it will start to kill my prompt. One thing that would make this awesome for me is emacs keybindings. Overall though, I think this has nice potential to be a super useful tool. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the feedback. The UI is a bit of a hack for the prototype and will be a more proper control for release. Emacs and vim keybindings are on my feature list. I think Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N work for command history in the prototype, but don't quote me on that.

Good to hear. Yours is the first kickstarter project I've ever backed. Thanks again for making this available.

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#17
post #3

For what it's worth, it's very, very buggy on Windows 8 x64. I couldn't get tab completion working, and after the first dir command, everything went downhill. It began behaving like a text editor. When I typed or backspaced, it backspaced over the prompt and everything else. The kickstarter video was pretty promising, though. Might I suggest you compiled x64, too? x64 seems to be more commonly sold over x86 these day…

Same here, after a git pull it froze for ~20s and then started behaving like a text editor. (Win7 x86)

Re: Reimagining the Windows Command Line

#19
post #7

Man, this sounds like the best thing ever happened to cmd.exe, I will give it a try and back it on Kickstarter. But I think such a project should be developed under an open source license and maybe licenses can still be sold like Textmate.

A few suggestions:

* Make shortcuts for tab splits in both vertical and horizontal

* Tab titles are not so necessary, right? Just draw a line between vertically or horizontally split Windows, like iTerm2 does (it is really neat).

* Word-wraps?

* I was in c:\demo, I wrote a nonexisting command (let's say lls), now I'm in c:\program files\wish.

* On a prompt, I can use Backspace to delete PS1-like string, and after deleting something and pressing return, it crashes

* Add it to PATH so that people can run it via Run window (Windows+R).

* "set" command runs without params in cmd.exe, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490890.aspx this doc might help.

I have recently joined Microsoft and I was using Linux-OSX before that for work and I miss zsh+iterm2 quite a lot.

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