What does HackerNews think of terminal?
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
The ipad pro as great as it is, will not replace a Macbook. Sure it can do similar things, but for professionals who only need one app and email for work or for grandmas that don't need much it certainly can be the only device. But it cannot do everything that a laptop can do and that's why most people need both a (tablet and a computer)
The surface pro devices are on their 9th generation. This is what you want if you want to travel with a tablet only experience that you are able to do laptop stuff with. Sure the tablet experience is miserable but tolerable. The only things mac users are missing is IOS/MacOS. Which I admit is a big miss. Let's be honest, the Mac OS is great it's always been the hardware that has been lacking in other areas. But the surface device is a full blown computer that runs a full desktop OS and can virtualize others. If your workflow allows for a windows device,and if you like learning and trying new stuff, you will most likely enjoy your experience. Otherwise you will be as miserable as a die hard windows user who is angry that CTRL+V is CMD+V. If devtools are the only thing keeping you with macOS then you owe it to yourself to checkout WSL[1] and the new windows terminal app[2].
It's understandable that it's much slower and more challenging to make changes to functionality that's become part of Windows core.
If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.
They already have one open source part I know of, the new conhost[0].
There's certain things easier on one or the other, usually caused by silly hardcoding of paths (or other OS-specific assumptions). I've run into this with python packages on Windows for sure.
My Windows dev is mostly limited to .net, and I've been writing cross-platform for years (first via Mono, now .net core / .net 6). Most challenges with cross-platform .net are caused by hardcoding Windows-specific paths and backslash (vs using Environment.* and Path.Combine()), and secondarily by using win32-specific things (eg: registry).
Tip for Windows dev use: install Windows Terminal [1], scoop [2], oh-my-posh [3], and busybox [4]. Makes the cli so much more usable, at least for someone like me with linux CLI muscle memory (ls, grep, etc).
I've found the combo of busybox utils and PowerShell is very productive. I nearly always have at least a couple terminal tabs open, and I'm nearly 50/50 of whether I use cli or explorer to browse or operate on files.
>I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console
>Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio.
I realize that comforting language isn't a priority for a lot of devs/documentation writers, but it's always good to keep in mind that we are dealing with other people reading our docs and we should take the time to care of each other with our language.
If you're on macOS or Linux, use the built in terminal. If you're on Windows, use Windows Terminal [0], the new one, not cmd prompt.
Do me a favor, look at Facebook [1], Apple [2], Amazon [3], Netflix [4] and Google [5]. Now tell me which one has more Open Source repos than MS [6]. I'll give you a hint... none of them. Sure, volume of open source repos may not be the best metric, but to say in 2021 they are enemies of open source with almost 4k open source repos is just dumb.
Hell, even the new MS terminal [7] is open source. They realized that FOSS isn't the enemy and is actually good for the tech industry at large.
[1] https://github.com/facebook [2] https://github.com/apple [3] https://github.com/amzn [4] https://github.com/Netflix [5] https://github.com/google [6] https://github.com/microsoft [7] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
WSL2 has a completely new approach than WSL1, so compatibility is better.
The console subsystem is open-source at https://github.com/microsoft/terminal. Feel free to file bugs, complain, or what have you. That’s what we’re here for!
To quote GP, “better late than never, I hope”.
Just missing a Quake mode for me (summon from a screen edge with a keyboard shortcut), but that's being talked about for v2. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/653
You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.
The Console/Terminal team first took-ownership of the Console & Cmd codebases in late 2014, so it's been ~5.5 years.
Until v. recently, the team averaged ~2.5 devs and 0.5 PM (I had to split my time across Console and WSL).
Since spring 2019 when we began the effort to build Windows Terminal, we've grown the team to 4 devs and 1.25 PM (I am now the .25 since Terminal now has a dedicated PM).
During this time, we have shipped improvements to Console in every release of Win10, including transparent background, VT, 24-bit color, and many perf, stability, etc. fixes. But we can only do so much to the Console before we start to break users' existing systems, apps, and tools.
Since Console & Cmd's key responsibility is backward compat, we're pretty much leaving them alone.
But we're plowing ENORMOUS effort into building Windows Terminal which is shaping-up nicely for its v1.0 release this summer. Please give it a try and if you find problems, find/file issues in the github repo because, yes, Windows Terminal and Console are open-source!
30 seconds or so
It looks rather interesting, if still in prerelease. (also, there's a trailer for it on YouTube - so weird [2])
0: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal-preview/9...
I haven't seen any C++11+ wrappers for ncurses... until, recently: https://github.com/clangen/cursespp, https://github.com/Praetonus/Ncursescpp strange license.
There are people who are on the forefront of terminal tech, examples are stuff by https://github.com/saitoha, https://github.com/mitotic/graphterm
There is hyper: https://hyper.is/ It works on windows. But by then, you potentially have the lag time most terminal users want to bypass.
For windows, maybe https://github.com/microsoft/terminal will encourage more terminal innovation by bsd/linux -> windows crossovers.
On Linux, try this: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
I wrote a book on tmux that briefly touches terminal stuff. I still get confused when terminals are miscolored and emit junk characters. There's a lot more going on behind a terminal than meets the eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX_terminal_interface#Gener...
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
You still have to build it from source in VS 2017 or 2019, and there are a few rough edges (currently only middle click for copy/paste), but it's a great start. They should have some official binaries up pretty soon.
There’s a theme that makes it look compact (nicer?) [2]
iTerm is native, supports plugins (Python scripting API), is CPU/RAM friendly, with milliseconds input (very important for touch typing), it’s open source (GPL v2) [3][4], the author is a proficient programmer which I hope to sponsor via GitHub Sponsors program soon [5] although you can already sponsor him via Patreon [6], offers smooth split panes, hotkey, buffer search, intelligent autocomplete, instant replay, an exaggerated amount of extra options available from the application settings, additional shell integrations, inline images, password manager, annotations, and the list of features continues with the beta builds.
Having spent several years using Linux (xterm [7], gnome-terminal [8], guake [9], terminator [10], among others), then moving on to macOS (Terminal.app [11] then iTerm.app), and with the recent news in the Windows world [12], I don’t see any reasons why would anyone install a terminal emulator built on top of a web browser, when there’s a good list of alternatives using native libraries and UI, with much more performance, and better features.
But as people say, to each their own.
[1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html
[2] https://i.imgur.com/46mY0O6.png
[3] https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2
[4] https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2
[5] https://github.com/gnachman
[6] https://www.patreon.com/gnachman
[7] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/
[8] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-terminal
[10] https://terminator-gtk3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gettingstar...
Also, I don't recall macOS terminal being open source.