> The Windows Console code-base is currently (July 2018) almost 30 years old ... older, in fact, than the developers who now work on it!
Which really shows, especially since you still can't use a TTF-font without editing the registry.
Which really shows, especially since you still can't use a TTF-font without editing the registry.
We added support for TTF fonts a few releases ago.
I mean, they used to suck, we get it. They're actively trying to improve but that, too, is not enough.
- "You used to be fat!"
- "I'm thin now, though, through hard work. Isn't that worth something?"
- "...but you used to be fat!"Personally, while I was merely describing what I perceived other people’s viewpoints to be, I don’t know why it’s so hard for Microsoft to make a normal terminal app. People have the choice of a dozen adequate terminal apps on Linux. I guess this article explains any difficulty.
As far as MS modernizing, one could look at it as, what would you think if 25 or 30 years ago, IBM said that they were turning around and we’re now a modern, agile company instead of a slow-moving relic of the previous era, and they built an awesome new console app for OS/2?
http://unixwiz.net/images/console-setup3.gif
(Personally, I don't care for TTF since I prefer the contrast and sharpness of a good pixel font, like this one: http://www.hassings.dk/lars/fonts.html )
If that has changed recently, that's fantastic!
Alas, as one of our dev's says often "Fonts are just files containing collections of lies"!
Some fonts claim to only contain monospace, glyphs, but don't and include non-monospace or irregularly sized chars. Others just lie completely.
But if you have well-formed TTF fonts, that express correct metdata, and ARE monospace, then they should be selectable.
edit: pain points with conhost*. I work on conhost, the "terminal", not PowerShell
My understanding is that improving PowerShell's start time is a big part of the next release of Windows 10, and that's great, but once that's done was the right time to put PowerShell as the default console on Windows, not before. 98% of why I open a prompt is to run "ping", and waiting for the prompt to actually show up in PS takes longer than a ping timeout. (Which is to say, if you need one takeaway from this post: Remember that no matter how cool you make PowerShell, most of us are only opening it to ping something, that's the most important experience to get right.)
Especially some of the decisions with the install screens for Windows 10 seem to highlight that people at Microsoft aren't aware how some subtle changes cause significant pain/delay for IT folks. Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.
[1]Example: Programs and Features from the legacy control panel no longer appears in search, even if you type it all the way out. Typing "appwiz.cpl" is the fastest way to see what's installed on a computer (and what versions) at a glance, but kinda a pro trick.
So I'm hesitant to go overboard on custom registry entry pushes (as opposed to the standard templates) for things that only affect IT experience.
Security Questions are a really bad anti feature that nonetheless is really persistent. I don't need 5 more random alphanumeric Passwords in case I forget that other random alphanumeric password I can barely remember. In most places online where they are used the rip open huge security holes should you actually set reasonable a answer to "Whats my Pet called?".
I end up mashing the keyboard for each one to create hopefully suitably random answers that even I myself don't know. But it's still arguably an additional security hole that I have to simply hope Microsoft hasn't somehow stored in plaintext somewhere.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30418886/how-and-why-doe...
This may be by design, but there has to be a better way. Unix/Linux consoles have allowed mouse copy/paste for as long as I can remember and I've never experienced this bug over there.
Really annoying when you go out to lunch with a job running, only to come back to find that it's right where you left it. So many solutions to this problem like making the copy/paste mode harder to trigger accidently. Visual feedback that it's in that mode, or allowing the buffer to expand indefinitely when copy mode is triggered.
Pausing the job is the last thing I'd want, especially since this seems to easy to trigger accidentally.
- Conemu can show up on a shorcut, Windows Console can't - Windows Console doesn't have tabs - There is no CTRL + R to search for the last command
Ok maybe I've got more bash issues: - autocompletion in cmd doesn't work, not for commands nor for command arguments, like in Linux consoles - mc doesn't work in cmd
- I really hate dos batch language because it is not logical imho (I don't want to start to rant about it here). On the other hand I remember the bash language better and can write small one liners to create commands that don't natively exist. PowerShell is not an alternative because it treats everything as text and inserts new lines, where bash does not.
On Unix this is typically a shell feature, not a console/terminal feature. The corresponding way to do this in the Windows console would be F8, I think.
> autocompletion in cmd doesn't work
> I really hate dos batch language
None of those have anything to do with the console.
type directory name... hit tab... get slash added automatically at the end... mind blown
I will be using F7 a lot in the future.
As an aside, maintaining backwards compatibility (this is DOS era stuff) is why IMO it would be very hard to update core windows utilities, but maintaining backwards compatibility (and similar decisions) is why IMO Windows is as popular as it is.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1641948/f-n-shortcuts-in...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...
Microsoft's done a lot of work on legacy components of Windows like cmd and notepad in the last few years, assumptions about behavior that has worked the same for the last twenty years may no longer be valid. ;)
We've been working on not only tons of bugs, but adding plenty of new features, including support for VT sequences, 256/RGB color, improving our unicode support, enhanced accessibility support.
The fact that all of our devs are under 30 is merely coincidence :)
Quick edit for UNIX style copy-paste with the mouse goes all the way back to Windows 9X.
The only issue is that it was always disabled by default, until they changed to be enabled by default with the latest set of changes.
Spending a couple of seconds after logging in to enable it, for the very first time on a new system, was never a big deal.
Why they made that design decision, we will never know. Maybe a dev was working with a lot of hex output? (even so, he should be slapped retroactively, unless he's Raymond Chen, cause Raymond Chen is amazing so we'll forgive his transgressions)
I'm not sure the box selection is super useful these days, but in the late 80s/early 90s, GUI-style interfaces were very popular, and a box selection makes a certain amount of sense, so you can avoid picking up borders and so on. Would have been nice if they'd got both types in from day 1 though...