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Comment by eminence32 | Hacker News Reader

A quick off-the-cuff remark based solely on the title: in 2024, I think the state of the terminal has never been better, in large part to Microsoft making a high quality terminal easily available to everyone on Windows [1]

As an application author, I love being able to assume that all major platforms have a good terminal and that my favorite terminal rendering libraries should Just Work on all of them

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

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I mainly use microsoft terminal now just beacuse it did a better job handling more of the font decorations (italic was one that I recall). My one gripe though is that it seems like microsoft terminal is still kind of slow at scrolling. If I accidentally grep for something that spews a lot to the screen, terminal is just plain hung up a bit. And for many of us - but not everyone? - control-space in emacs is just kind of broken. Long standing open issue for that one.

Have you turned on the new render engine in the microsoft terminal settings? It is marked beta but should be much faster.

I really dislike that they re-used the TERM value from xterm instead of getting their own merged into terminfo. And then not documenting which sequences are actually supported and which aren't.

You would be surprised how much software is built exclusively for TERM=xterm or TERM=xterm-*.

I'm aware and i think its not okay. Its incorrect software.

And yes, that difference is significant because the F-keys, Ins, End and companions won't work.

You're getting downvoted but you're not wrong. Using TERM=xterm-* should be deprecated, and in this case in particular that likely means stepping on some toes.

It's like the user agent string in browsers. Using that instead of checking for feature availability directly is always going to end up in a mess like this over time. Heck, there wasn't a Windows 9 because of how much software would break because they had `if (osversion.startswith("9"))` check to decide if it needs to act in pre-XP mode, long after XP itself was EOL. Most people aren't willing to give up functional workflows on principle alone. "stepping on some toes" massively understates the impact.

Which is exactly the root cause of terminal weirdness.

Instead of a standard, we have mountains of terminfo entries which are mostly slight xterm variants and ancient hardware

Sounds like the user agent string in web browsers.

They have their own, and it's documented.

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-m...

Surely you can imagine that it takes years or more to get people to update though, so switching to a new entry right away could make for a bad user experience.

That's not made by them and not supported by upstream, see full thread: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2019-08/msg00...

True, but no matter the terminal, you still have to deal with either cmd or PowerShell (and its horrendous startup time), "active code pages", and the fact that you cannot write UTF-8 to stdout without it getting messy - you need WriteConsoleW and/or SetConsoleOutputCP but that affects the whole environment, ... cli on Windows was and is painful.

You can run WSL or nushell on Windows Terminal

PowerShell 7.4.2 starts in 1s for me.

zsh starts in 0.1s for me. 1000ms is a very noticable latency to me...

Imagine how much work we would do with those additional ms per day.

Once upon a time, I was tasked to rewrite build scripts for windows based team from .bat files to bash scripts (via a git-bash). People on that team were not exactly unix fans, in fact they resisted hard almost everything coming from us linux weirdos. But reduction in build time was so big they asked for this and embraced it with genuine love.

I bet it was a bit more than a few ms per day.

Does this mean I can run the Build Your Own Text Editor[0] tutorial in Windows without WSL? I did it in Linux a few years ago, recently heard of Crossterm[1] and was thinking trying to remake it with that, but maybe it's not necessary?

[0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

[1] https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm

Crossterm does indeed work well under Windows Terminal. I use it indirectly via the ratatui library[1]

[1] https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui

Yes, although thankfully on Windows we have a modern graphical terminal, with a scripting language that took plenty of learnings from non-UNIX CLIs into account.

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