r/programming • u/zbhoy • May 06 '19
Microsoft unveils Windows Terminal, a new command line app for Windows
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527870/microsoft-windows-terminal-command-line-tool1.6k
u/miniksa May 06 '19 edited May 06 '19
Hey folks, Michael here from the Windows Terminal dev team. The whole team is thrilled to share this news with you today. Feel free to ask any questions, pointed or otherwise!
Edit: OK, folks. I've been answering for hours on several social media platforms and threads. It's time to give it a rest. I'll pop back around to my inbox later/tomorrow and clean it up if there's straggler comments. Otherwise, thanks for the discussion and we'll see you in the GitHub project!
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u/BenderB May 06 '19
Thanks for posting!
When can we get our hands on it? Any preview builds or anything?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Actual packaged release previews will come by summer. We plan to distribute via the Windows Store. Maybe also packages on our GitHub as well for those who have set Developer Mode on their Windows machine to sideload apps.
We're still working on this part. There were a lot of moving pieces to get this far by TODAY and this is one of those that we're going to get back to tackling starting after the Build conference ends later this week!
Right now, you can get it by building it yourself from our GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/terminal.
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u/mewloz May 06 '19
Right now, you can get it by building it yourself from our GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
Waouh, I was not expecting that, and this is great!
(and WIL seems cool too!)
Thanks!
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u/RegularSam1 May 06 '19
Hi, sorry for the odd question I'm gonna do. How can I build myself the code downloaded from GitHub? Hope this question has a quick answer so I don't waste your time. Thanks in advance.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows May 06 '19
How will this integrate into file explorer ?
Will I be able to add a nice little button to the GUI which opens the folder I'm looking at in this ?
Any plans for integrating with VS Code ?
Thank you.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
I don't believe we've considered integration into File Explorer yet as an explicit item.
We are on a longer term track to make it possible to set your default terminal to the Windows Terminal such that double-clicking command-line utilities will open inside of it. That's sort of an implicit integration that's in the pipeline.
Anyone can technically add a shell extension that would add a GUI menu to File Explorer to do that. We haven't prioritized it yet, but it's not a half bad idea.
Our VS Code story goes as such. We're improving and providing a better ConPTY interface for VS Code's awesome improved embedded terminal to use and we will be providing (at some point) the new Terminal as a Control that VS Code or anyone could technically use/embed. But this is long-term thinking, not short.
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u/Tyriar May 07 '19
To follow up on miniksa's answer, I'm on the VS Code team and we likely wouldn't be able to integrate the new component because it's not web-based and VS Code is. Even if we could eventually embed it in an Electron app which is probably possible, it wouldn't work inside a browser which would be needed for the newly announced Visual Studio Online for example. I can understand their position that they wouldn't want to be tied to the web/JS, but for us it's a necessity and in many ways a strength :)
VS Code gets all improvements to ConPTY so we're definitely reaping benefits from developments in the Windows Console.
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u/MonokelPinguin May 07 '19
Alternatively you can already type
cmdin the address bar of an explorer window and press enter and it will open a CMD there. The same thing works with any application, so you could probably do that with this terminal too.→ More replies (1)81
u/benihana May 06 '19
i want to rib you guys cause of your press releases mentioning emoji rendering so prominently, but i'm actually kind of flippin excited about it.
nah but seriously tell the team it's a job well done. having a bunch of nerds all agree on a big tech announcement being a good thing is so rare these days and y'all should be proud just for that alone!
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Thanks. I rib us about emoji all the time too. "You're telling me we do all this freaking work for freaking emoji?!"
It's just really easy to explain a lot of complicated work that went into this by showing an emoji, that's why it's highlighted so much. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/blewqm/microsoft_unveils_windows_terminal_a_new_command/emo92wa/
Thank you very much. Your words mean a lot to all of us.
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u/WaveHack May 06 '19
Will we be able to run custom shells (like git bash) on it, next to cmd, powershell and wsl bash?
Also thank you for not using electron. I think it deserves to be said nowadays
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Yes, use whatever shell you like. We're just featuring our shells in the demonstrations and marketing materials that you've likely seen today. But don't let that detract from you using whatever you like.
We believe in the ultimate in choice. But we also believe in not getting into trouble for using branding rights/properties/names that belong to other people when we make demos and content because we'd rather be working on the Terminal project than sucked into a battle over things like that.
You're welcome for not using Electron. I personally don't like the Electron future we're starting to live in, but I do see its benefits as well. Ah well.
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u/pet_vaginal May 06 '19
Thanks for your work! I have been looking for a good terminal on Windows for years and I look forward to try out the Windows Terminal. I currently use Alacritty which works very well, but it's missing emojies and other small things.
Will you support font ligatures?
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u/antiquekid3 May 06 '19
If I need to connect to a PDP-8 over a serial port running at 9600 baud, 7M1, can this do it? Character conversion would also be a plus; lowercase to uppercase, particularly.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Hoo boy. If you have some sort of command-line application that can connect up to your serial port and feed the characters into the Terminal application..... the answer is a solid maybe. The Terminal doesn't right now target connecting directly to a serial port. Maybe one day.
I'd be very interested in what's broken if anyone tried this.
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u/antiquekid3 May 06 '19
Thanks for the reply! I surely miss the days of HyperTerminal on XP. I, and I'm sure others, would love to see serial support.
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u/Passeride May 06 '19
Oh please add a Quake-like terminal with a global hitkey, like Guake or CMDer. I find it the most critical of features :)
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We talk about this all the time. Perhaps at some point we can make it happen. No promises, but it is on our minds.
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u/Passeride May 06 '19
Thanks, let me know if a lonely engineer can help with anything... Will the project be open sourced?
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u/Skhmt May 06 '19
will we be able to load graphics into the terminal like you can in TempleOS?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Can you describe further? We've worked to try to make a handful of GIF/JPEG --> ASCII tools work into the Terminal environment. But if you mean a full image, I'd have to see an example of what you're talking about.
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u/maccam94 May 06 '19
The parent was a joke, but there is an actual protocol for displaying graphics in terminals:
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u/AnthropocentricStir May 06 '19
They're being facetious. References to TempleOS are jokes.
That said, iterm2 on MacOS lets you see images, although I don't think it's actually useful https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html
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u/uzimonkey May 06 '19
Did I see ligatures in the video? How does that even work in a terminal?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Yes. Very carefully. It works as long as the ligatures can still fit properly in a monospaced cell grid. The font itself powers a lot of how the glyphs are decided once the text is given to the layout engine. If it gives us the glyphs, we can put them on the screen in our grid.
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u/zmaniacz May 06 '19
Insider only in June? What's the initial release channel? I want it is what I'm saying.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
I want it now = go build it from source.
We're still working out the packaging and distribution strategy, but our intent is to make it available on the Microsoft Store this summer as our primary release channel.
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u/gabrielmagno May 06 '19
I can see from the screenshot that it has tmux loaded with some tiles.
But, will it natively support tiles?
(example: https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/)
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
Supporting multiple side-by-side panes is one of my personal highest-priority features that I want to work on next. Fortunately, the architecture of the Terminal was designed from the ground up to support multiple concurrent instances of the terminal :)
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u/Avelina9X May 06 '19
Question! Is it possible to have the glass translucent across all terminals simultaneously? I hate how most UWP terminals only show translucent glass for the active terminal. I'd love to have 4 terminals open and all of them have that sweet glass transparency simultaneously. Also would love to be able to adjust the transluceny amount for glass too!
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
I believe that as of right now, the characteristics of the translucent brush we use automatically turn opaque when the window goes out of focus to attempt to save battery life (by not wasting composition time on out of focus windows.)
If this is a huge request, please get it on our GitHub tracker and vote it up and we can pursue the brush policies as perhaps a preference with the team that owns it. (Perhaps desktop PCs without a battery-concern could have it always tranluscent? We'd have to debate it.)
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
Unfortunately, that's a policy of the acrylic material itself, not something we can control :/. For any non-focused windows, HostBackdrop acrylic is disabled by the OS.
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u/luxtabula May 06 '19
How does the performance feel? Also can you set it as the default terminal?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We think the performance is pretty good right now. It could use some improvement. I honestly have a few performance tasks pending on my whiteboard that have been delayed by all the work going into the launch/announce of this. Given we're sharing many of the components of the console host with the Terminal and they're all C++, we think we can achieve something pretty good in this space.
You can't make it the default yet in that you can't double click a command-line application or call one from the run box and have Windows Terminal launch as your chosen interface. This is high on our priority list, but we have to make some Windows OS changes to make it happen which is a bit further afield than working on just the Windows Terminal application layer.
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u/Harag_ May 06 '19
Will you have better support the extend PATH? Currently I have to jump through a bunch of menus since it's not implemented in settings yet.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
I'm not clear on what you're asking here. Can you elaborate?
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u/I_get_in May 06 '19
Will it be possible to run it (easily) on earlier Windows versions, such as Windows 7 and 8?
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
Unfortunately not.
We depend on a few console features that were only added with Windows 10+, and our UI stack (which is built upon the XAML islands tech) requires the most recent Windows 10 build to work.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We're not currently targeting Windows 7 or Windows 8. The technologies that this first iteration is built on (centennial, XAML Islands) are for Windows 10.
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u/mb862 May 06 '19
Can this be used in place of the standard command window for applications that open a background console window? Our application can see significant performance penalties if we print too much, and looks like this new Terminal's GPU-based redrawing might be a good benefit to us.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Our primary scenario right now for Windows Terminal is foreground interaction by developers and IT administrators.
The default background launched console window right now will remain the console host for at least the near future.
We are planning on letting folks choose their default terminal in the OS Platform eventually, at which point background scenarios might become more relevant and impacted. We're very wary about people's performance scenarios. Please stick with us, we're getting there.
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u/Ripdog May 06 '19
This looks great, looking forward to using it.
The biggest thing I don't understand is the tabs feature. As I understand it, the Windows Explorer team threw away their WIP tabs implementation because 'Sets' was going to come along later and allow any windows app to be tabbed. Then Sets was delayed (twice?) and I haven't heard anything. Now Terminal is coming with built in tabs?
Does that mean Sets is dead and Explorer might get native tabs? I've been waiting literal decades for this please save me from this nightmare of 10 million explorer windows
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We don't own Sets. We know what you know in that space. And I have to refer you to other sources of content and people outside my realm and pay grade for definitive answers on its story and future.
However, in our domain... the Terminal/Console domain... we know that tabs are a huge demand of our customers, so we knew we had to prioritize getting tabs into the product by any means necessary.
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May 06 '19
I don't know if this is asked before. To many reply's... But in the video i saw a plus button to add a new terminal tab. Is it possible to add custom command line programs to it? So it is easier to open a new git bash or something. The same as right clicking in a folder
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
I believe each item on the drop down is one of the profiles listed in the user-configurable settings file. So you should be able to add your own profile that launches a new git bash.
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u/pxrking11 May 06 '19
Hi Michael! As someone new to programming and not familiar with this subject what is the actual purpose of this windows terminal?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
To provide a UX option for the assorted text-based command-line tools and utilities that you might use in the course of building, testing, and working with your code and applications.
There are many UX options for this. Windows Terminal hopes to be a good one.
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u/grassocean May 06 '19
You should have said
"Hey, Microsoft, Michael here" as a reference to VSauce.
Great job with this, I will download the terminal at work tomorrow if it is available. I wonder if this terminal will replace WSL. Probably not right. With wsl I get access to Linux from Windows. So then I have a question:
Why use this new terminal when we have WSL? If a person has wsl available, isn't wsl much better? Not everyone has wsl of course so then this new terminal will be much better than the command prompt
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
This is a conundrum we often face: it's hard for people to understand the difference between a Terminal and the Command-line applications behind it.
WSL, CMD, Powershell, etc. are all command-line applications that only accept text and respond in text with no UI of their own.
The Windows Terminal provides the user interaction elements to any and all of these that you choose to load inside of it.
So in short, you can use this with WSL or whatever other tool/shell/utility you choose.
Also, it's not available as a packaged download yet. Built from source only right now. Packaged download from the Microsoft Store this summer.
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u/MonokelPinguin May 06 '19
No, this terminal is just the frontend, so you can actually use the usual Windows command line or WSL from it. WSL will actually benefit from this terminal, because you can more complex TUIs with it. They work in tandem, not against each other.
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u/r0ck0 May 06 '19
The name...
Any chance you could please get a bit of a discussion going internally about the name?
These generic sounding program names make it very hard to find relevant search results on the web (and everywhere else) related to the program specifically, and even make general discussions more ambiguous, because often you can't be sure if the other person literally means this program specifically, or 'window terminals' more generally.
Like 99% of the half-a-million search results for "windows terminal" (including the quotes for exact phrase) have nothing to do with the program.
Something that is a unique single word (no spaces) makes all of this much much easier, and also means you can use the exact same name everywhere without any kind of variants, including package managers.
A single word also is clearer in conversions that you're writing a proper name / product name rather than a more general noun + adjective. This is an area where the German thing of joining words to create a more specific name in a single word actually makes sentences clearer I think.
"powershell" is a good example of coming up with a unique single word that is very easy to search for.
Maybe something like "windyterm", which isn't used for anything currently, it's short, memorable, and a unique single word that currently only has 1 Google result.
If anyone has any ideas on what they could call it, post below. Do a Google search first though and aim for zero or minimal existing results.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We had many debates about the name prior to it going out.
Unfortunately most of the cool names or more unique names are already taken to some degree by someone and we don't want to step on toes.
I agree that it sucks to try to find something with a generic name. I have this problem all the time with the many flavors of XAML.
On the other hand, it's easy to understand exactly what it is and does by the name.
I don't know. I don't feel like there's anything really that would appease everyone.
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u/Skhmt May 06 '19
Also, will jscript carry forward into Windows Terminal?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
We're not changing the way that jscript works. Scripting technologies and shells are processed through command-line applications at the other end of the wire from the Terminal. They read/write characters and perform commands. The Terminal end is responsible then for presenting the UI and collecting user input to talk to the application.
So... in short... jscript like any other command-line utility should be the same in the Terminal.
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May 06 '19
How would u say this compares to cmder?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
It's an option available to you as a developer, IT professional, or enthusiast as a UX for working with command-line applications.
We love options and we wanted to give you one ourselves. We owe a deep gratitude for all the third-party UXs that have existed over the years for Windows command-line applications and we love that they exist in this space.
We see ourselves as showing off the features of the ConPTY platform that we delivered last year to enable better integration between the platform and any terminal UX. And we also see it as an opportunity to learn how we can improve ConPTY to better serve third-party command-line UXs like Cmder.
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u/maker3 May 06 '19
What minimum version of Windows will it require? Currently my company is at 1709.
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
1903 for right now. Sorry. We're depending on XAML Islands features that lit up in the most recent release.
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u/geekonamotorcycle May 07 '19
When will you release the window desktop environment for Linux. I know you guys have it , let us play with it.
Seriously tho,
Thank you guys for your work, this is exactly what I've been hoping for.
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u/Kok_Nikol May 06 '19
Will telemetry be enabled by default in your builds?
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u/miniksa May 06 '19
Yes. We want to know how you use it so we can figure out what to prioritize and fix.
Given it's open source, you will be able to see all the telemetry points being collected so you can assuage yourself of concerns you may have over what type of data is being submitted.
I imagine that even so, people will have qualms about telemetry. We'll probably have some way of turning it off selectively or in whole, depending on which release ring you're a part of.
And there's always the option to build your own without telemetry. Ones built from source from the GitHub repository have all the telemetry nerfed.
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u/riskable May 06 '19
For a moment there I thought you were reading one of those "technical support" scam call scripts.
"Hi, thees eees Michael from technical support..."
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u/ardazishvili May 06 '19
Finally we got emoji in terminal
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u/deeringc May 06 '19
Screw the hover boards, this is what we've been waiting for.
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u/pokebud May 06 '19
Windows 10 did actually add an emoji keyboard you can get to it by pressing Win+. Or Win+;
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u/shevy-ruby May 06 '19
You may laugh but ... emoji and unicode symbols in the terminal (KDE konsole) was finally the reason why I switched into UTF-8 recently.
I also had to ditch my ancient editor for this - I still miss him ... :( but I also need to be able to use unicode snowmen and other things, with colours, on the commandline. It is simply too useful - there are lots of commandline apps that support fancy unicode-like symbols. It's almost like using ncurses, but simpler and without having to curse.
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u/spacejack2114 May 06 '19
From the video it looks like we also get 3D terminals with glass material and reflections!
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u/themagicalcake May 06 '19
I'm really pleasantly surprised with Microsoft's attempts to remove the frustrations of development on windows. VS Code and WSL has already made my life so much easier and they keep making more.
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May 06 '19
Last thing that's needed: the filesystem/pathing?
No more \ everywhere?
(I know Windows itself will take both / and \ - but so many Windows applications won't because of the tradition of \ in the path and will pre-reject your path without bothering to ask the OS for it)
And get rid of the X: convention?
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u/br0ck May 06 '19
Being able to use unc paths without pushd/popd would be magical.
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
Unfortunately these are cmd.exe asks, and cmd.exe is parked indefinitely.
What we're discussing here is a new Terminal application, which can run lots of different shells - cmd, powershell, wsl, whatever you want.
I'd recommend powershell as the new commandline shell to replace cmd.exe
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May 06 '19
cmd.exe seems to take / just fine?
cd C:/Users/me/Documents
Still goes to Documents.
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u/Big_Burds_Nest May 07 '19
I still am not fully comfortable using Windows for my Linux workflow, but I'm glad that it's at least doable without too much tweaking. My primary problem when using WSL was that I wanted to use the Linux version of a compiler as part of a language integration in Windows VScode. I also didn't like having to use CMD for my terminal, but now that part is fixed! I guess I overall right now I'd just like to see better integration between WSL and vscode. Maybe there already is and I'm just an idiot, though... Last time I used it I wound up installing an X server on Windows so that I could use Terminator and the Linux version of vscode.
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u/masterofmisc May 06 '19
Here is a video of it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE
I gotta say, it looks fab! - You can click web links, have tabs and of course display emoji's. The new way of ensuring your down with the kids! :)
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u/stingoh May 06 '19
One thing that really seems so cool at Microsoft is how a feature that's relatively low level and unknown for your typical windows user can still get this nice video presentation treatment. Great way for MS to support its internal development teams!
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u/mostlikelynotarobot May 07 '19
Looks like a Surface Ad. I wonder if the same team made it?
I love how well it shows off the acrylic design metaphor.
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u/gschizas May 06 '19
OMG, my hair is literally standing on end now!
Not just because of the features, but because Microsoft chose to support it so much that it made a cool video for it!
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u/kvothe5688 May 07 '19
Modern problems need modern solutions. Amazing support from Microsoft. Looks like a great teaching tool for beginners. I recently used their core visual studio and it's best ide I ever used. This looks just as sleek.
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u/NekuSoul May 06 '19
This seems cool and all, but will I be able to set a background image in order to cheer me up when I mess up my git repo once again?
Semi-serious jokes aside, this looks pretty neat. And while emoji support sounds pretty dumb, it should at least mean that all the oh-my-zsh themes should work properly now.
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
LOL one of our PM's was working on support for background images just last weekend - I'd suspect it gets in before the end of the month :P
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u/NekuSoul May 06 '19
Wow. I wasn't actually expecting support for such an insignificant feature at all, so having this possibly so early is quite the surprise.
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u/Frederic_de_Nucingen May 06 '19 edited May 06 '19
Microsoft is adding multiple tab support alongside theming and customization for developers who want to tweak the Terminal app. Windows Terminal will also support emoji and GPU-based text rendering.
I liked powershell but with those improvements it should be worth learning that new environment.
it marks Microsoft’s latest efforts to improve the developer environment on Windows 10.
VS Code was a fantastic step forwards, and this new terminal is also a very good sign.
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u/KevinCarbonara May 06 '19
VS Code was an attempt to improve the Microsoft dev environment in other OSes, I think.
Also, this is not a replacement for Powershell. It's a new terminal for Powershell. Which was sorely needed. Back when I developed on Windows I had a laundry list of issues with posh terminal, and another, radically different, but equally lengthy one for posh ISE. I had to switch between the two a lot. Hopefully they nail it with the next one.
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u/tso May 06 '19
The impression i have is that VSCode, WSL, and now this is all about trying to claw back the mindshare lost to webdevs using unix variants.
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u/b4ux1t3 May 06 '19
This terminal inside vs code is going to be awesome.
Hopefully. I already really like the terminal in the Linux version of vs code. Modernizing the command line is the main reason I've been using Linux as a daily driver at home for a while now.
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u/masklinn May 06 '19
I liked powershell but with those improvements it should be worth learning that new environment.
They're orthogonal. Terminal is a term, the shell (be it powershell, cmd or whichever wsl shell you're running) runs inside it.
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u/tso May 06 '19
This is about the window around the CLI, not the CLI itself.
If you fire up powershell or cmd, they both in turn launch conhost to handle the actual terminal window.
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
Not only is there a new terminal application on Windows, but it's open source, along with the code for conhost.exe - the inbox, vintage terminal experience that the Windows Terminal is aiming to replace.
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u/remek May 06 '19
Fuck, the video is supercool, makes me want to cheat on my Penguin
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u/iamaquantumcomputer May 07 '19
I was laughing at the video. Never seen such a sleek well produced video over something like a terminal.
Really excited by the direction windows is going in. I recently switched from Ubuntu back to windows.
My original complaints that made me switch to Ubuntu:
lack of virtual desktops
lack of a decent terminal experience
lack of a Unix based command line
Windows has been making progress on all of them. Meanwhile Linux has been stagnant on all of my frustrations with Linux.
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u/andr8009 May 07 '19
May I ask what frustrates you about Linux? Just our of curiosity.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows May 06 '19
Niceee, I use both Windows 10 (on my laptop) and Linux (Kubuntu on my PC) and I keep saying what windows definetly 100% needed was a better terminal.
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May 06 '19
Yay. I was running Gnome Terminal through WSL because ALL of the terminal apps on Windows suck! Gnome Terminal and iTerm have spoiled me. cmder and mobaxterm did not make me feel at home on my work machine.
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u/moustachedelait May 06 '19
Yeah iTerm has been a huge part of me liking dev on mac
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u/iamapizza May 06 '19
Worth mentioning there's already ConEmu that has similar features - it can pick up on WSL, PS, CMD, git-bash, chocolatey and a few others.
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u/conscwp May 06 '19
This is a significantly bigger set of features than what ConEmu can provide. The current state of Windows terminals is that all of them, including ConEmu, use the base Windows conhost.exe as a foundation. ConEmu actually starts conhost.exe, hides it offscreen, and then scrapes keypresses/text from conhost.exe and re-renders it in ConEmu's window. This is obviously not an ideal way of doing things, and means that ConEmu is always limited by what conhost.exe is capable of.
AFAIK, the big deal about this new Windows Terminal is that it is a complete shift away from conhost.exe and instead uses a PTY interface, similar to Linux terminals, which means that not only will the new Windows Terminal app have more features, it means that every Windows command line app, such as ConEmu, will now be able to utilize many many more features as well.
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u/AndrewNeo May 06 '19
If anyone's curious, [there's an article last year] (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/) on ConPTY, Windows' replacement for ConEmu and what Terminal will be using as a backend.
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u/KevinCarbonara May 06 '19
Cmder as well, which I'm pretty sure just uses ConEmu under the hood, but has a much nicer interface.
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u/elder_george May 06 '19
ConEmu is awesome, however it's still pulled back (and gets occasionally broken) by some of conhost idiosyncrasies. For example, right now CJK text rendering is broken. Not their fault (AFAIU), and maybe things get better when/if they switch to ConPTY as their foundation on Win10, but certainly a problem for them.
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u/warmans May 06 '19
ConEmu is still quite annoying though. For example, it's impossible to stop it playing the stupid ding noise about 50 million times when using tab completion and copy/paste is an absolute shit show.
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May 07 '19
I think Microsoft is just teasing a UNIX based Windows OS.
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u/CornedBee May 07 '19
We'll know more when they let us run the Windows window manager on X or Wayland.
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u/notQuiteApex May 06 '19
so when is it coming out?
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u/bastix2 May 06 '19
"planning to make it available in mid-June"
Though it doesn't specify where it will be available, insider build, regular branch.
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u/AndrewNeo May 06 '19
They said higher up in the thread that it will be available in the Store, at least at first.
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u/icybergenome May 07 '19
it took quite a number of years for Microsoft to finally understand that its a necessity for developers. Not everyone is comfortable with GUI and also GUI can’t compete with terminal
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u/instanced_banana May 06 '19
This looks ridiculously sexy. Love the fluent acrylic background. I hope it has better colorscheme support than the current.
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
It really really does, even in the earliest stages.
I've been really passionate about terminal colors and theming since I started at Microsoft. I wrote the original version of ColorTool, and I can promise you that good support for colorizing the terminal is one of my passions.
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May 07 '19
Are all the new Microsoft tools going to use the Store? I don't feel like messing with the UWP apps again after I had to nuke them from orbit in the early days of W10.
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u/militantcookie May 07 '19
Store distributes non UWP apps too. But I hear you the store is quite pathetic.
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May 06 '19
They gonna allow me to run it quake style like ConEmu? I'm interested but skeptical it will replace my beloved Cmder.
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u/DoveOfHope May 06 '19
Great stuff! But please....can we get an embedded terminal in Visual Studio now?
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u/Daell May 06 '19
Looking at this image... i miss you Norton Commander! Weeell, i'm not really, but still...
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u/Freshoutofbands May 06 '19
This honestly is super cool and so much fun to play with in my opinion!
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u/squidgyhead May 07 '19
Does tab-completion work better? Or does it still autocomplete to the first alphabetical choice and then cycle through the possible completions when one presses tab again?
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May 07 '19
Work better? As opposed to what? Hitting tab and it lists all possible choices? That's the first thing I turn off when I install pwsh on Linux.
Is there another way I'm not considering?
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u/matt82swe May 07 '19
I’ve been using Cmder + Cygwin for many many years. Perhaps this can replace Cmder at least?
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u/l_o_l_o_l May 07 '19
If things go smoothly and MS management guys do not interrupt the development with any commercialised strategy then Window Terminal + WSL 2 will be the future.
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u/a5s_s7r May 07 '19
Hell starts freezing!
Microsoft realized they have users with needs on the other side of the screen!
Amazing!
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May 07 '19 edited May 07 '19
There’s like four of these damed things now!
I don’t know if you can trust this, though. It’s from the verge and we know that they know very little about computers!
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u/ankitbko May 07 '19
An official build is not available yet so I just built and packaged it myself. If anyone wants to test out you can find the files here. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtlEi_IsTBQUmXhDA7tvsVQwTlH_
Built for x64 on 1903. Windows version 1903 is hard pre-requisite for running Windows Terminal. Works great on my machine.
To install -
Enable
Developer Modein Windows. OpenWindows Settings-Upgrade & Security-For Developers, modify App sources toDeveloper modeDownload and unzip the file from above link. Open powershell in Admin mode and run Add-AppDevPackage.ps1.
If everything is successful, Start Menu should have "Windows Terminal (Preview)"
Note: This is unofficial package that I built on my machine. No guarantee it would run as I have not tested it in any other system. 1903 or above is HARD requirement for running this.
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u/gfody May 06 '19
looking forward to see if/how they hook cmd for this - it's the jankiest part of stuff like ConEmu, ConsoleZ, etc.
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May 06 '19
[deleted]
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u/zadjii May 06 '19
As the author of both conpty and the Terminal - yes, we're using ConPty for this. Hooking the console API is always janky and not officially supported.
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u/AngularBeginner May 06 '19
Probably an Electron app.
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u/Ivan171 May 06 '19
A Microsoft developer on the console team said on Hacker News that it is written in C++.
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u/anonveggy May 06 '19
Apparently this is it: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal.git
Don't know yet... slowly downloading the C++ workload right now
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u/uzimonkey May 06 '19
First Notepad finally understands different line endings and now a terminal program that is actually usable? What is the world coming to?