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Comment by ramanujank | Hacker News Reader

My main reason for running Linux is the Terminal.

I'm 35. Began with computers ~10. Spent my first 10 years using Windows, followed by 10 years of the Mac. I'm (hopefully) in my 10-year Linux run?!

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Doesn't Windows have a decent terminal nowadays?

They have 2 built in ones. powershell and cmd. CMD has been there forever and works mostly like MSDOS (mostly). powershell is pretty neat and is in many ways better than bash once you understand it. They have also in the past 2-3 years actually fixed up some very long standing issues with the shells. There is also an experimental shell manager in the windows store which is kind of nice. You can also install other unix shells if you want. But being different systems they can get a bit quirky.

It does, the new Windows Terminal app is pretty nice. What it does not have is a good set of command line tools. Powershell is powerful and great in its way, but it is cumbersome to use for little tasks. And the lack of a command-line text editor like vim is a huge pain in the ass.

However, if you install Windows Terminal you will find that Start menu behavior changes in a annoying way that the Terminal developers can’t fix without changes to Windows itself[0].

With Terminal installed, if you search for a directory from the Start menu — hit the Windows key, start typing, press enter — the menu won’t close automatically.

0: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7122

That is not my experience. I just tried it twice, searched for Notepad, it opened right up both times and closed the start menu, and I have terminal open with two WSL sessions.

EDIT: OK, now I see it. It is specific to pinned folders in the Start Menu, not search or pinned Apps. I don't generally pin folders to Start so that's why I wasn't seeing it.

Interesting. It was happening for all of my folders, IIRC, although it’s possible the ones I tried happened to be pinned. I don’t use the pins on purpose anyway.

No, it never even had a resizable terminal until early win 10. Unix terminals are an economic powerhouse in themselves and binutils like sed/awk/grep (which windows never had and you need to modify windows to have these tools).

Are you saying that installing or building software on your machine is modifying Windows?

There have always been plenty of terminal options on Windows.

And iTerm2 on macOS is a better terminal than any I've come across on Linux. The lack of iTerm2 is actually the reason I daily drive macOS at work instead of Linux in the first place.

Probably does. I'm also guilty of not having given Windows a chance recently.

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