Disclaimer: I'm primarily a Mac user developing on macOS and Linux. Swears by iTerm 2.
You lost me right there. I don't care how Alacritty wants the world to work. I care how I want things to work.
WT is meant to be used on Windows, where WMs aren't a thing.
You are not the first person to go overboard calling it the best terminal ever. It clearly is not, yet. The developers themselves acknowledge that there's a way to go, yet, and maintain to-do lists of the many things that it as yet lacks. It does make me wonder, when it has simple deficiencies compared to the likes of XTerm, how seriously the people who claim "best terminal ever" have actually exercised any of these programs.
> It's the best terminal I've used so far on windows and Linux.
Again its the best that I'VE used for MY use cases.
That’s the main problem, not boxes.
Also, for text box configs there’s usually a XML/JSON behind the scene anyway. It’s not like I can’t grep my iTerm config even though I configure it from the GUI.
> Setting UI is just one the things I would expect to be unfinished or not done.
That’s what I thought too. Just stating the pain points, not blaming anyone for missing features in a preview release.
* https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1564
* https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/4232
Note the discussion of JSONC in the latter.
Also, since you're a Mac guy you'd be happy to know you can press ctrl + comma to open the settings
Also, can do is one thing, likes to do (learning a JSON schema to change the font size) is something else.
Oh, and tons of people use a terminal under guidance when they need to accomplish something that’s otherwise difficult or impossible.
If you associated JSON files with VS then that's specific to your personal setup and unrelated to the Terminal app.
You also don't need to learn JSON schema and - I'm sorry to say this - but if editing a well-documented text format is too much of a hurdle to you, then maybe you're simply not the target demographic for the app.
The tons of people who blindly use copy-pasta wouldn't even need to use the Terminal app (a tool explicitly aimed at power users and devs), so that's a non-argument to start with.
I’m pretty sure the terminal app was advertised as the next generation console experience for Windows, which means it is going to replace cmd, and will be used by non-power users.
Re binding: that’s just the default when VS is installed. Also, whether it’s Visual Studio is irrelevant, what’s relevant is it definitely isn’t Windows Terminal.
Edit: By replacing cmd I probably meant replacing conhost or something. Not completely sure about Windows separation of shells and terminal emulators but the idea should be clear.
I'd love to hear a legit day-to-day use case, though. I'm honestly very curious to hear about that since even as a developer, I pretty much never use the command line (outside of WSL, which I don't consider a typical use-case either).
When developing software in Windows, however, there's simply no need.
> How do you compile
I press F6 in my IDE.
> install dependencies
I click "Add nu-get package"
> etc. [I assume version control operations and the like]
Again, I simply use the built-in tools of my IDE of choice which are usually bound to hotkeys.
This is hard to fathom, especially for modern web development, but I don't do web development and the embedded systems I work with don't have a shell while the GUI programs have, well, graphical interfaces :)
This tells more about your skils then anything else. If there is NO NEED for that in your world, there is defintelly a NEED for you to dive into it - something you don't know you can't use or find a need for it.
Especially on Windows.
Terminal is basic IT literacy. Or at least, it should be. And it can't be if you protect people from it like its some kind of baba yaga.
It's a good place for them to be stored; it's not a great UI, but that is a thing that can be built over any storage and there is a reason it's v0.10 and not v1.0.
> I’m pretty sure the terminal app was advertised as the next generation console experience for Windows, which means it is going to replace cmd
ConHost. Cmd is a command interpreter that runs in a console, not a console itself.
> and will be used by non-power users.
Eventually, sure. It's very much a power-user-focussed preview today, though.
The lack of comments in JSON is an often raised point and it's really useful being able to add comments in a "living" config file.
The other issue I have with many JSON config files is they don't always contain all the options, so you end up having to search around for what the right directive is to add to a particular config file (this is my biggest gripe with hacking VS Code config files). This is less of an issue with other formats because you can often comment out lesser used directives.
I think the reason JSON is popular for config files is because it's easy to implement rather than easy to maintain and I see JSON as a regression from the TOML / INI etc formats that used to be commonplace beforehand.
I also agree with your frustrations with the replies about "people who know how to use a terminal know how to use JSON"; sure they do but that doesn't mean it is appropriate usage of JSON. I could write a config file using golfed Bash and say "but you should know how to read and write Bash" but people would understandably dismiss that saying it's still not user friendly and I don't see your point here any different.
Annoyingly, they don't allow trailing commas, but I suppose it's easier to strip out comments before parsing than it is to customise the JSON parser.