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It's not really possible to substantially improve either conhost or cmd due to backwards compatibility considerations.

The risk of breaking something for someone is just too high.

And some people dont realize the amount of work Microsoft puts into backwards compatibility. Just look at articles describing the leaked Windows source they describe Microsoft putting in code to path third party Windows software to make sure it still works.

This is also why Wine struggles from version / config to version / config. They cant account for every edge case the way Microsoft does / has. Microsoft by comparison has unlimited resources while Wine is just volunteers who can only test so much software.

They just announced Windows Terminal and even spent time and money on a marketing video for this yet unreleased product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE

Granted, conhost will stay for compatibility reasons and this is a new thing.

But it's open source: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal . And according to the readme contains the source for conhost.exe too.

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