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What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

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Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#111

Post by wtetzner »

Const-me wrote: post #95
laumars wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. Microsoft have done a lot over the years to troll the Linux community. While many of the younger HN members will be familiar with the "new open source Microsoft" some of us oldies have had to endure IE breaking the web plus ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins. Comments like "open source is communism" from top…

> IE breaking the web For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest. > ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins Everybody did that. Have you forgot internet with A/V streaming locked to RealNetworks, and vector graphics and animation locked to Macromedia?

> For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest.

Yes, they made it just good enough to kill the competition, and then let it stagnate.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#112

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

Edit for folks having trouble understanding: the post you're replying to literally mentions two of the best tabbed terminals for Windows. That's not the problem.

A fast, inbuilt, 2017-era terminal is.

- ConEmu has a UI that's a shotgun blast of shit.

- Hyper still fails at basic shortcuts.

- ConEmu plus other software still has a UI that's a shotgun blast of shit.

- Some person's half maintained fork of putty is some person's half maintained fork of putty and we already have Windows openssh for SSH purposes.

- A proprietary app you need to pay for is a proprietary app you need to pay for.

- tmux is not a tabbed terminal.

- Something that uses cygwin is something using cygwin.

The post is requesting a clean tabbed terminal, included in Windows, and maintained full time by Microsoft employees (whether Open Source or proprietary).

Edit: removed 'fully featured' as someone below thinks that means I want all the bullshit the other terminals add, rather than tabs, working escape sequences, and other terminal features.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#113

Post by rebeccaskinner »

RegW wrote: post #105

So what is the end game with WSL? What is it that MS is actually trying to do? I remember the NT POSIX subsystem, which was a bit of a joke. It was badly limited and just seemed to be a box ticking exercise to get past some government requirements (disclaimer: I don't actually know if that's true). Whatever the reason, we ended up having to port our POSIX software to NT because customers insisted it was POSIX complie…

I suspect that this is a side effect of work they are doing trying to build up their capabilities with Azure. I think the long game is to try to support docker containers that are built against Linux natively on Windows. The other interpretation is still in line with the move toward containerized services: I think they want to make it easier to build a containerized app on windows and deploy it on k8s/docker swarm/etc.

Apple has been losing their darling reputation among developers, and I think MS sees an opportunity to bring a lot of people back over who might otherwise try to make a go of Linux. If they can offer a plausible story for developing and deploying applications from windows I think it would drive more business in the cloud and enterprise areas; at the same time having more developers around on the platform will continue to ensure that they have the software to keep consumers from migrating to iOS/Android/ChromeOS type devices.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#114

Post by tejinderss »

teh_klev wrote: post #84
nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

What I do is start sshd in WSL then ssh to @localhost from mobaxterm which is quite a nice (tabbed) terminal app. Works a treat, even with the free edition. http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

ssh has its own typing latency, doesn't feel like native to me

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#115

Post by fcanesin »

For me Microsoft has realized that their profit on cloud (where Linux is dominant) can be significantly higher then licensing Windows, so they are pushing for a better Linux experience on the user desktop and we will see in a couple of years the Microsoft Linux Server (maybe they will buy Cannonical for that ?).

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#117

Post by badminton1 »

laumars wrote: post #99
badminton1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I say bash, I am referring to GNU bash, the shell that has existed for decades now on Linux, BSD, macOS, Solaris and an endless list of other operating systems. I do not care if Microsoft couples their ABI and the shell and decides to call that "bash". GNU bash will continue to be what it has been for decades now. I also do not care if a lot of people want to take the entire GNU/Linux userland and decide to call…

bash.exe on Windows is also GNU Bash: C:\Users\laumars>bash --version GNU bash, version 4.3.11(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. The rest of the subsystem isn't called "bash", it's called "Windows System for…

Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. have significant differences among them, and the source code needs to be aware of them. Same with all crossplatform software.

But from the perspective of a Linux binary running on WSL, running on WSL should be the same as running on Linux. If bash is an exception to that, that seems more like a hack on Microsoft's part.

If they implemented the execve() syscall and others, starting whatever other user specified shell should not be problematic.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#118

Post by wildmusings »

nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

You can run gnome-terminal with WSL and VcXSrv. You might need to run unity-settings-daemon once per session to get font smoothing working correctly.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#119

Post by tjoff »

nailer wrote: post #112
nailer wrote: post #75

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal? Current Windows terminal options: - ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can't be changed, apparently due to maintainer's insistence it works on Windows XP. - Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell. Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a thir…

Edit for folks having trouble understanding: the post you're replying to literally mentions two of the best tabbed terminals for Windows. That's not the problem. A fast, inbuilt, 2017-era terminal is. - ConEmu has a UI that's a shotgun blast of shit. - Hyper still fails at basic shortcuts. - ConEmu plus other software still has a UI that's a shotgun blast of shit. - Some person's half maintained fork of putty is some…

ConEmu has the best UI I've ever seen in a terminal. Way better than anything I've seen in *nix.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#120

Post by m_fayer »

zimbatm wrote: post #109
RegW wrote: post #105

So what is the end game with WSL? What is it that MS is actually trying to do? I remember the NT POSIX subsystem, which was a bit of a joke. It was badly limited and just seemed to be a box ticking exercise to get past some government requirements (disclaimer: I don't actually know if that's true). Whatever the reason, we ended up having to port our POSIX software to NT because customers insisted it was POSIX complie…

They want to attract developers. One reason why it was so easy for Linux developers to switch to OSX was that they had a mostly-compatible shell environment.

I see a free or nearly free "developer edition" of Windows 10 incoming. It won't have some of the enterprise-y features (bloat) of existing enterprise editions, but it will be capable, feature-rich, free (maybe you'll have to somehow demonstrate that you're a developer) - and most importantly it will be free of the creepy shit. And then they'll be well positioned to drink Apple's milkshake, as far as developer-mindshare.
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