Btw did anyone noticed that in windows 10 you can resize cmd.exe to more than 80 characters width! When I first saw it I almost cried.
Display mode: MODE CON[:] [COLS=c] [LINES=n]
Added this to the end my Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 in my $HOME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell directory. (run: "notepad $PROFILE" in PS)
MODE CON COLS=200
Clear-Host (I get some artifacts)There are a lot of subtle improvements I think many are not aware of, like, if you paste in text with smart quotes they will be changed to straight quotes.
i miss ctrl-d for example
Also MS should really improve the inbuilt apps to do this stuff.
Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost, even after the Windows 10 update. It's fast, supports a ton of thoughtful features (such as customizable title bars via extended ANSI codes, real line wrapping during resize, good Unicode support from the very beginning, etc.). With Terminal.app I can be quite happy and productive even with someone else's Mac or with the default settings. I've used iTerm2 but their features weren't compelling enough for me, and the iTerm font rendering is noticeably worse in many ways. Apple has also been very good about giving Terminal.app continuous updates.
On Windows though I have almost always had to install MinTTY or something just to get a halfway usable terminal emulator. The default emulator is just so limited - Unicode support is very plug and pray, the title bar is totally locked, and having to use Windows APIs to change text formatting is a pain. Conhost is also amazingly slow when it comes to large amounts of text, so much so that printf can be extremely detrimental to program performance just because it has to wait for the terminal window to catch up.
PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions. That means that in practice I often pop open cmd.exe even if PS is a better choice, just because I don't want to sit through a long load time.
Microsoft really should get their Terminal story in order. I'll definitely try out ConEmu the next time I sit in front of a Windows box, but like you I wish MS would improve their own apps!
I once started a Chinese character flash card program in Python on Windows.
The yak shaving was unbelievable. I never got a working version, but I learned a lot about code pages, and why "building a console from scratch" is not actually the right answer to "I want to be able to test a toy program I'm making before it's finished."
Still, would have been nice to have a program that essentially took in and put out text without learning everything about GUI elements.
I'd never written anything with a GUI before, and "I'd like to see unicode" is a really weird place to dive in.
Small price to pay to be able to pipe objects, man!
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
I basically stopped using ps ( for smaller stuff) because the startup tone is so awful.
Did I miss something?
Cmd-<number> is a pretty standard way to jump to tabs (and arguably, Ctrl-tab as well).
- Clink is for cmd what PSReadline is for posh.
- posh-git does what git for windows does (I personally don't like git info in my prompt, so use neither, and have a custom, Unixy-one)
Properly configuring cmd.exe was enough for me. Then again I only use the terminal on "as required" basis.
(On older versions of Windows, ConEmu[1] does that, too, but it's third-party software, of course. It also supports tabs!)
[1] - http://cmder.net/
> If you have trouble with anything I am happy to help. But you will have much better chances to find solutions on the pages of the upstream projects. Those are:
Console emulator ~ Conemu (https://conemu.github.io/)
Cmd.exe enhancements ~ clink (https://mridgers.github.io/clink/)
Unix tools on windows ~ git for windows (https://git-for-windows.github.io/)In Win10, you can resize the buffer with a drag as well.
What I really like though: you can now use Shift + arrow keys to select text and C-c/C-p to copy/paste.
ConEmu can even integrate stuff like Putty.
So this explains the joy I feel over small improvements like those mentioned above.
If you're going to use ConEmu, just go ahead and use the straight & regular OpenSSH command-line ssh tool.
Then you get all the standard niceties you can stash away for global reuse in ~/.ssh/config.
I don't miss PuTTY one bit.
I might switch from putty to ConEmu with OpenSSH then. Presuming I can get ConEmu's look close enough to my putty.
You just needed to go in to the properties of the window and increase the screen buffer size (both width and height). It's one of the first things I'd do upon installing a Windows machine.
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
I don't know what's changed now but they've rolled that policy away. Maybe virtualization?
I don't know whether it still was necessary, but the removal of support for 16-bit applications from 64-bit Windows 7 will not have hurt there.
> Every idea for a feature starts out with an imaginary deficit of -100 points. That means it has to demonstrate a significant net-positive effect on the product as a whole in order to emerge as being truly worthy of consideration.
I still dont understand how this was not "fixed" years ago, sure some config windows have fixed widths because it makes sense, but something as a terminal obviously needs the ability to grow (or shrink), especially after they introduced sticky windows and people actually used "tiling"
(Everybody I know that uses the console window a lot has always just set the window to 120x9999 or 160x9999 or whatever and forgotten about it. It's one of those things that's obviously kind of lame, but after a while you just forget about it.)