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Comment by paperwork | Hacker News Reader

I'm rooting for MS. My (not so serious) test for windows is simple: the day I can resize dos command prompt as easily as terminal windows on linux/osx is the day Microsoft I need to seriously consider going back to windows :)

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I think you're going to live forever disappointed. The command prompt shell is one of those programs that just doesn't get updated and/or any new features. Like notepad.exe, there are so many easy things they could do to make it actually _useful_, but won't.

Not disagreeing, but I suspect notepad.exe is the way it is for a reason - it's the Windows equivalent of vi, the thing you use to try to recover when everything else is falling to pieces. As such, it doesn't and shouldn't have dependencies on anything that isn't absolutely essential.

I believe Task Manager eschews the common control library and reimplements a lot of UI stuff itself. Same reason.

I would agree, except for the lack of support for Unicode and LF line endings.

What are you missing in terms of Unicode support? Line endings aside, it doesn't do too horribly with http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

You don't really need to pull in external deps to improve notepad.exe; nearly all of the low-hanging fruit would be a few lines of code in that application itself. Even busybox's vi implementation is a more capable editor, and it's one short C file (with a handful of trivial deps on the rest of busybox for shit like the allocator and random string functions.)

I still can't believe that a hung program means the Task Manager can hang as well. I don't know how many times I've had a game freeze and had to wait on the Task Manager. Ctrl+alt+del brings up the "lock, log off, task manager" screen pretty quick, then Task Manager doesn't load until I go make and finish eating dinner.

Ctrl- Shift - Esc

It puts you straight into processes tab and can be done with one hand.

Since that shortcut was added, that's almost always how I launch the Task Manager. Recently however, I read that Ctrl-Shift-ESC (CSE) doesn't launch the Task Manager in the same way that Ctrl-Alt-Del (CAD) will.

I went looking for the source but I only found this blog post from Raymond Chen [1]. Based on that discussion, it looks like winlogon.exe is responsible for launching the Task Manager both ways, so perhaps that more recent discussion was incorrect.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/30/10261...

Does it still take minutes to load, though? My problem has never been the difficulty in launching Task Manager, it's been with getting task manager to respond in any amount of hurry.

I just hit CTL+SHIFT+ESC and Task Manager was there instantaneously. If things have gone so screwy that you really need Task Manager, then yeah, it will probably be slow.

I know you're not being serious, but there are some other terminal apps that are better than the basic DOS prompt. Check out ConEmu, for example.

Now, once you've got ConEmu or something like it that will resize nicely and do other things, you'll still be stuck on the crappy DOS-style prompt though. :)

I feel similarly, and seriously. It's not so much just the usability of the command prompt, but that it would be a symbol of a change in priorities towards adding functionality for developers, and welcoming non-Windows technical audiences.

If I'm using a non-built-in terminal, and a non-built-in Unix compatibility layer, why am I using Windows?

See, this is why I like Linux and OS X. The built-in Terminal is practical. The built-in text editor (well, at least on Linux) is practical. On Windows, I have to replace both from the get-go to get anything done.

Why are you using Windows if you want it to behave like Unix?

I'm not, in that at work I use a Mac. I write Java server code for web servers and batch data-analysis, deployed on Linux boxes. A significant portion of my time is spent either ssh'ed into a Linux machine, or using the various Unix utilities as well as git and mvn in the terminal.

My point, perhaps poorly stated, was this: I prefer a terminal-heavy development environment because that is the most efficient way of interacting with remote servers for the work that I do. I can't consider using Windows without a sense that they've made it a priority to address my use cases and scenarios, and the single lowest hanging fruit possible in that regard is to spend half a dev team (2-3 devs) on modernizing the terminal to the point where when I'm at home and want to check something on a server, I use my Windows desktop instead of switching to my Mac laptop. Even better would be dedicating one or two dev teams to supporting a Unix environment natively, so Cygwin isn't necessary.

For what it's worth, I much prefer the Windows GUI to either Mac or Linux. I was a test developer at Microsoft for Windows 7 and part of 8, and I wrote this comment on my home PC running Win7. I would like to be able to use Windows for the UI and the familiarity I have with it, but those two things, a good terminal and a Unix-like environment, are requirements for my job. And I know from experience that this scenario is absolutely the furthest thing from the minds of the people working on Windows.

Most developers don't have a choice in the supported platforms of the product they work on. If your product targets Windows (and it will if the customers demand it), you don't have much choice!

For me, personally: Visio and Photoshop

Also checkout Cmder (http://bliker.github.io/cmder/) for a pre-customised ConEmu that bundles several useful UNIX commands. Plus ConEmu supports Quake-style dropdown that has radically improved my work-flow on Windows.

Also Powershell is pretty awesome if you take the time out to learn it.

This. ConEmu combined with cmd/msys/cygwin/powershell is as close to a proper unix terminal app one can get. I actually find ConEmu itself better than the corresponding Gnome/KDE/Xfce/OsX applications.

Why does the default prompt have {git} and {lamb}? Is there any intro documentation?

The thing is, if you actually look at how those programs work, they're still actually running cmd.exe and then wrapping that. This leads to all kinds of weirdness...sometimes resizes don't work quite right, color support is iffy and requires yet another wrapper, etc. It's better than nothing, but it's a FAR cry from something like konsole or even generic tabbed xterm.

Another is Git Bash (http://git-scm.com/downloads) which gives a reasonable terminal/shell on Windows including many of the standard utilities (e.g. ssh).

Git Bash is just cmd.exe

Not if you launch bash.exe, then it's GNU bash, version 3.1.0

Is it as slow as cmd? I found that running `readelf -a` in cmd will take, say ~5 seconds while running the same command under Cygwin+PuTTY, the command completed in well under a second. The text output is just plain slow and to a baffling degree.

Anyone know why that is?

To this day, I don't understand why don't didn't have an intern or somebody fix that. They push powershell so hard, yet provide a horrible, horrible terminal to work in. Make it like putty. In fact, go find one of these makers of terminal software and just buy they out... Do something. Nobody takes their command line stuff seriously simply because the terminal is so god-awful.

Get Far Manager www.farmanager.com - you'll have the both the command-line and midnight-commander/norton-commander like file viewing/browsing copying tool. Press Ctrl+O to toggle between full-screen and showing the file bars. Maximize the windows as much as you want (it'll work). Make the shortcut to start Far Manager maximized.

There is even project to bring ConEmu + Far Manager, and there is even way to make Far Manager work with cygwin's bash (I have separate link for it).

Give it a try - it's zip-installable, and has real installer too. Lots of plugins (including zip browser, exe browsers, ftp/ssh/etc.)

I'm of the same opinion as paperwork. I can't speak for him/her, but for myself the reason is not that I can't get the software I need (Console2 and mintty suit me fine) but because the quality of the tools provided with the OS are indicative of the general level of polish (inside and out) of the OS as a whole.

If they haven't managed to fix some of the most basic and most user-visible flaws in the past decade or more, what other cruft is lurking in places users don't regularly see? Additionally, as a software professional myself I see a whole lot more of the ugliness under the hood than most users and it does nothing to suggest to me that my first impression was wrong.

Edited to add: I know you didn't actually disagree, and your suggestion is a good one. I felt it would be taken by many as a reason to discount the original opinion though, and wanted to emphasize what I feel to be the more important aspect of the original notion.

We can't always choose the hardware that we want, and we can't sometimes choose the software (OS) that we like.

At work I'm stuck with Windows, but at home use OSX & croutonized debianized chromebooks.

In my regular Windows toolbox are: Far manager, cygwin (full install), SysInternals, NirTools, Windows 8 SDK/DDK, emacs-win, but haven't time to get around and learn Powershell...

Powershell ISE

The ISE is clever, but honestly, nothing beats a PuTTY-like terminal.

I actually find PuTTY to be horribly frustrating to work with, compared to a proper terminal emulator on OS X or Linux. Part of that is just Windows (when the window closes it's gone), part of it is that it's really just an SSH command (no local terminal, no easy SCP), part of it is the cumbersome UX (make a bunch of changes to the connection and then hit 'go'; oh wait, you didn't save the changes first? crap).

I do agree with the core of your point though; an actual terminal with actual commands that actually work well would be great.

Windows Powershell is actually really fascinating from one point of view though: the idea that instead of passing raw (inconsistently formatted) ASCII/Unicode data between pipes, the data is actually presented in terms of a data structure; thus you can easily say 'sort by the third column descending' or 'show every second record'. A significant amount of my bash scripting on-the-fly tends to be chaining several commands together to munge output data solely for the purpose of letting the next command parse it properly. Powershell, in some ways, takes care of this.

In 2014, PuTTY still makes you set your whole window to a complete Unicode font (usually buggy and weird-looking) to avoid international text showing entirely blank. Surely even Windows has better text API than that?

you can use powershell ISE. you can make the terminal full screen with no issue

Properties -> Settings -> Layout -> change res -> Save.

I never understood why some people make such a big fuss out of it.

Because that is a huge fuss to do what practically every other app can easily do by dragging the border, including other windows apps.

Sometimes you need to change your prompt to be a different size and an annoying 5 step thing is a big fuss

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He/she is referring to dynamically adjusting the characters size (its line wrap) when resizing the window. You can even resize the command prompt to fullscreen but the lines wrap to 105 characters by default.

Because some of us have to deal with hundreds/thousands of servers. Lots of Windows boxes without Chef/Puppet bootstrapping them is a miserable experience. I don't know how many times I've disabled IEESC and made cmd quickedit enabled in my life just to be able to use the box (prior to doing it via bootstrapping).

Let me enlighten you then. Just create a shortcut to the cmd prompt, change the settings in the shortcut and keep a copy of that shortcut. The seetings for teh command prompt are saved in the shortcut. Now you just have to go around with it on your USB key and double-click on it to have a command-prompt with all your settings already done.

You can thank me later.

I wish all other windows were this easy to resize. I could simply have an array of shortcuts for all the different browser window sizes I might want. It's a much better system, really. Thank you later? I'm thanking you right now! Thank you.

Here's the regkey that controls this setting: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978570.aspx

Should be fairly easy to script deploying that to all your machines.

Long, long ago, I wanted a way to launch arbitrary numbers of CMD.EXE windows with arbitrarily-chosen foreground and background colors. The standard settings only let you store a finite number of color entries (something like 16) to choose from. However, the registry key it finds the settings in is based on the executable name, so if you make a copy of cmd.exe called cmdb.exe and run it, you have N more slots of colors to choose from. So I wrote a little hack that took --fgcolor rrggbb --bgcolor rrggbb values and then made a hard link to cmd.exe in the temp directory called something like cmd_rrggbb_rrggbb.exe, set up the appropriate registry keys, and then invoked it with whatever other args you provided. Subsequent invocations with the same args would find the temp executable and reuse it. It was an absurd hack, but it worked really well and it amused me to write it. edit: and is a testament to how idiotic the CMD settings scheme is.

The fact that you have to go into the settings to resize it IS the problem that people make a big fuss out of. You didn't offer a solution, you described the problem.

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