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Windows Terminal Source Code

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Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#101

Post by userbinator »

judge2020 wrote: post #84
disruptiveink wrote: post #63

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.

They are entitled to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING beyond, if it is commercial software, my payment.

I want them to know

What the fuck happened to just TELLING THEM!? Oh, that's right, they didn't want to listen because they'd rather take complete control of your machine, forcing you into what they want, and monetising every last aspect of "your" life, all the while hiding behind the excuse of "the data says" to do what they want.

The amount of pro-spyware comments here is, quite frankly, excruciatingly abhorrent. So many comments here smell strongly of corporate propaganda, since they also always repeat the same tired talking points --- and it makes me wonder how much shillage MS does. Or how many others think that because MS is big and "successful", they should emulate the increasingly abusive behaviour that it (and to be fair, the rest of Big Tech) engages in.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#102

Post by userbinator »

nojito wrote: post #100
cryptonector wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean it doesn't work because then they wouldn't get to use "the data/algorithm says so" as an excuse.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#103

Post by naikrovek »

markus_zhang wrote: post #91
dundarious wrote: post #56

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.

The Terminal team is very aware of this code, and are not able to use it due to how Casey licensed it. They aren't even allowed to look at it. Casey deliberately licensed it as GPL so that Microsoft could not use it, actually. That's his choice, of course.

The Terminal team have a path forward to implement strong performance improvements based on techniques like those Casey described, and are working on those improvements now, I'm told.

Microsoft haters will continue to say all kinds of stuff no matter what Microsoft does, so Microsoft isn't doing this to appease anyone; it's just performance work that they didn't understand was as easily reached as it is, and they built the Terminal in wrong ways the first time around. Anyway, it's being fixed.

I've never worked at Microsoft but I've worked with a lot of MS employees throughout my career and I wish I could convey just how much the goals of the individual employees line up with people like us. The developers at Microsoft are people like us. Extremely and intentionally caustic feedback on Microsoft stuff does nothing but give those employees good reason to stop working on the projects they love, but which also get the most attention, like Terminal. This necessarily produces a worse outcome for the project.

I wish I could make the extremely vocal and vitriolic people understand that their vitriol is counterproductive in the extreme, and makes everything worse.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#104

Post by naikrovek »

cryptonector wrote: post #53
Guillaume86 wrote: post #29

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!

Why not? I want the features I use to be maintained. I am dead tired of advanced features being removed from applications I use.

With web applications every single round trip to the server is logged, inherently, and there are far more than one round trip to the server than there are page loads, I assure you. So it's ok there? "oh that's just logging, not telemetry." That's what telemetry is!

Google and Facebook track you (collect telemetry on you) across the entire web whether or not you use Google or Facebook AT ALL, and they each collect more information than Microsoft ever could. Google and Facebook do far worse things than Microsoft has ever done, but because they didn't ship a browser with their OS in the 1990s, they get a pass on everything, apparently.

I don't get it. the lies we tell ourselves are worse than anything anyone else could ever do to us, but we tell them to ourselves anyway because it is acceptable to crap on Microsoft, for imaginary reasons, and it isn't acceptable to crap on the companies doing the real bad stuff.

humanity is doomed. we are literally a garbage species.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#105

Post by ridiculous_fish »

SargeZT wrote: post #93
ridiculous_fish wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://n…

Maybe, maybe not:

1. It looks like ETW is enabled by default since Vista.

2. The code deletes the username due to "PII issues," suggesting that something is being sent back (line 295)

3. An oblique reference to a 5% sampling rate (line 284) suggests you may not be able to tell what it's sending based on network monitoring.

Apparently they are considering stopping collecting the list of processes due to "community consternation" but have not yet: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/6103

They could at least document what they collect so we aren't left guessing. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/terminal/issues/139

All that said, it is legitimately great that the source code and these issues are available publicly.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#107

Post by naikrovek »

nyolfen wrote: post #64

winterm looks very nice but it often screws up character alignment if you resize the window. it happens so frequently that i gave it up, because at least once a day i could no longer tell what i was typing or trying to copy. i'm a happy customer with alacritty windows builds, but i wish it had tabs.

Wezterm is nice and it has tabs.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#108

Post by DHowett »

rbanffy wrote: post #99
DHowett wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoa, thanks! It looks like I’ve got some reading to do.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#109

Post by dragonwriter »

mattl wrote: post #72

When did people stop calling them terminal emulators?

> When did people stop calling them terminal emulators?

I don’t know when, but since their features have increasingly become divorced from any terminal (other than similar software) that they might be “emulating”, it makes sense.

Re: Windows Terminal Source Code

#110

Post by tresqotheq »

naikrovek wrote: post #103
markus_zhang wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Terminal team is very aware of this code, and are not able to use it due to how Casey licensed it. They aren't even allowed to look at it. Casey deliberately licensed it as GPL so that Microsoft could not use it, actually. That's his choice, of course. The Terminal team have a path forward to implement strong performance improvements based on techniques like those Casey described, and are working on those improve…

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