Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I happily await the day when I no longer need to install PuTTY on all of my fresh Windows installs.

They really need to announce a conhost replacement.

The "experiments" in Windows 10 are undeniably improvements for when we still use things like cmd, but Powershell needs a modern terminal window and there needs to be a native answer to Putty for both SSH and Powershell remoting.

I'd say after SSH this should be a priority for the Powershell team. Conhost is holding them back. A lot.

Isn't ISE pretty much what you are asking for?

It tries, but I think ISE is super clunky and it's awkward to use. It lacks the simplicity of a bog-standard terminal while not adding features to balance out its clunkiness (akin to the difference between a text editor an IDE--the IDE had best add something I can use if I'm going to take the hit).

Could you expand why you find ISE clunky and awkward compared to standard terminal? I mean you can just type in stuff and get answers back with fairly minimal interference as far as I can tell, just like a regular terminal.

I would suggest you go look at iTerm2, because an example is worth all the words in the world. tmux integration, multiple panes in a window as well as tabs, easy buffer search, instant startup, everything.

A shell host should open and do its absolute utmost to get out of my way. ISE does not do this. It's just...it's what I expect 2008 Microsoft to think a terminal should be, lacking empathy for me as a user. And maybe that's intentional--maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe it's for mouse drivers who are forced to the CLI in extremity. But it's tasteless and it's hindering where it really must not be.

Those sound nice-to-have features, but (personally) I don't think the lack of those makes something "super clunky and awkward to use", especially in comparison to standard terminals. Do you think xterm is too super clunky because it lacks all the bells and whistles?

I still do not see where the lack of empathy and tastelessness is apparent in ISE.

I don't think xterm is clunky, no. It doesn't try to help me, but it also doesn't get in my way. iTerm2's feature set does not increase the friction of dealing with the shell inside of it. Literally every time I have to open up ISE, I go, "jesus, why the hell is it doing things?". The experience is just straight-up repellent. It's hard to really describe past "I'd rather click a mouse than use this." And that never happens elsewhere.

But anyway, your "nice to haves" are my "it's 2015, I'm not wasting my time with less." Microsoft's got more money than God, they can do something worth the time of day.

Honestly, I'm getting really interested in what you find so offensive in ISE. I mean, I can see it being not so great, but being straight out offensive I can't really understand. It is perfectly understandable if you don't like PowerShell (it is kinda weird). But ISE? The most different thing in it is a "fancy" tab-completion, and that hardly can be reason to so deep hatred.

And I'm not saying ISE is the best thing ever or anything, but it is a significant step up from conhost, and honestly not really lot worse than xterm in many ways.

What is ISE? Some cursory googling makes it out to be some kind of Cisco router thing.

The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd315244.aspx?f=...

Powershell doesn't support interactive console apps (those that want user input), so it's really not much of a cmd.exe replacement.

http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/tips/archive/2012/12/12/block...

To be clear - the ISE (powershell_ise.exe) doesn't support interactive console apps. powershell.exe supports them just fine.

Yes I see you are right, thanks for the clarification. The base Powershell.exe with a better window wrapper like cmdr actually should make a nice combination.

It's really too bad the limitation on the nicer ISE though. It does make a bad first impression coming from Linux, when trying to compile and run a simple interactive console app, trying to use ISE as a cmd.exe replacement.

conhost is getting some upgrades in Windows 10: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows10GetsAFreshCommandProm...

Given that a lot of new development in the Windows world is focused on the console, I expect that we will see more enhancements in the future.

One thing that I'm not 100% clear on: have they fixed multi-line selection in the Win10 command prompt?

Yes

Try ConEmu, it's a very good terminal window.

In a recent HN thread, someone pointed me to MobaXterm (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/) and I have gladly deleted PuTTY.

Been using it at work for the past few weeks. Really do enjoy it. Does include support for X11Forwarding, VNC, SFTP, etc.

Do you know if it has support for using an external text editor instead of the one they provide?

It does.

Another vote for MobaXTerm.

I use console2, with a cygwin zsh, and then run command line ssh inside that. Sounds a bit convoluted, but works really well and gives me the experience I desire, where remote shells and local ones look and act the same.

Awesome.

I've been stressing over finding a Windows SSH client that supports ed25519 and even thought SecureCRT recently just announced support for ECDSA, they do not have a timeframe for ed25519.

Off to try out how well this works.

What's wrong with putty? I've been happily using it for a few years. What have I been missing out on?!

just read this: https://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-saf...

I don't understand. Why doesn't Simon Tatham the original author of Putty just buy a domain, and put Putty there? Looks like he's piggy-backing off-of someone else's domain, and then relying on supposedly odd RSA/DSA signing of the provided binaries? Odd, to say the least.

Or worse, Cygwin, because of some obscure process that needs to connect via ssh to your Windows server...

Cygwin comes with openssh-server [1]. I'll admit cygwin is quirky and not the best option always but I've used it to host ssh server on Windows in the past.

[1] https://cygwin.com/faq.html#faq.using.sshd-in-domain

Agreed here. Installing and configuring Cygwin has traditionally been a royal pain; Microsoft offering some equivalent as an officially-supported Windows add-on (or just part of the core Windows) would be a godsend.

Just install Cygwin with MinTTY and be happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com