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!
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.
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.
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.