Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

OK, now I am really confused...

I can, right now, launch 4 different "terminals" in windows:

  > cmd -- gives me the old dos-like command line
  > wsl -- linux bash shell, which distro.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  > ubuntu -- ubuntu distribution, "on-top" of wsl?
  > powershell -- new microsoft command line

Now, there's a "windows terminal"??? I don't get it. Is it supposed to be a "terminal emulator" like putty or terminus that can use any of the above 4? Does it emulate a VT100? with mouse?

This is confusing, how do these 5 things fit together?

View on HN

Yes, Windows terminal can run any of those shells.

Shell = interactive program.

Terminal = thing that displays a shell and sends input to it.

cmd and powershell are "console programs". They launch conhost.exe which is the text window you are interacting with. Another "console program" for example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager. Or you can write your own. When Windows is asked to run console program, it spawns conhost.exe and the console program is putting the text inside conhost's window. That was architecture since Windows NT time. In Windows 10 timeframe there was an attempt to modernize conhost.exe and minor changes were made but ultimately the new approach was chosen. Windows Terminal is the result of that approach. It's essentially new conhost.exe (more complicated than that, but good enough for this one) and it provides the text window for all the console programs such as cmd, powershell, Far, ssh etc. to run

Now let's get to wsl/ubuntu. WSL - windows subsystem for linux. It allows Windows to run unmodified linux binaries. for example you can run Ubuntu on it. Or RedHat. Or CentOS, or Kali or a few other Linux distributions. Main way linux programs interact with the world is usually a text window (terminal) so originally conhost.exe was used for that. Now you can use Windows Terminal for this. Think of Windows Terminal and conhost as "window" for text programs.

Read the fine manual. Windows Terminal is a terminal emulator to cmd, wsl, pwsh, etc; a series of shells and runtime environments. And a pretty fine one indeed.

You can launch those shells in the old terminal. Or you can launch them in the new Terminal.

WT can host all of the others if you create a profile for them. It's replacing the chrome/window border around all of the others, not contents thereof. It's similar to ConEmu.

It can do VT100, yes, and with a mouse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com