New Windows Terminal - tabbed, emoji-capable Windows command-line experience.

[duncannah]

Looks ugly.

[jasonvp]

I'm glad to finally see some traction on this.  The MS developers hinted they were going to start working on this when they first released WSL a few years ago.  Cool to see it come to fruition and I can't wait until a binary is readily available.  As it stands, I start an X11 server and fire up an X-based terminal to do all of my WSL stuff.  I so despise the historical CMD terminal.

[LAwLz]

14 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Every instance so far has been, 'yes, you do.' 

What instances are you referring to exactly?

 

14 hours ago, Drak3 said:

And? Move to a standard that doesn't include emoji. It's a waste of time and effort to use a system that incorporates emoji garbage.

1) What character encoding do you suggest which includes better character support than ASCII (for example åäö but also things like Chinese and Japanese) but doesn't include emojis?

2) What drawback does emoji support have, other than you for no apparent reason hating them?

[ARikozuM]

How long until e-weebs start getting nostalgic about Powershell? 

[LAwLz]

47 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

How long until e-weebs start getting nostalgic about Powershell?  

This runs PowerShell.

 

This program is basically just a tabbed UI which lets you open up cmd, PowerShell and the Linux terminal (Windows Subsystem for Linux) inside one program.

[GoodBytes]

What was miss from the new entry is that that Windows Terminal is one thing coming new, but also the Windows Command Line Infrastructure is being rewritten (and also open source).

 

At BUILD Microsoft talked about how the back of a Terminal/command line works in Windows and Linux, and explained why they wanted to started new, and change the Windows Command Line infrastructure.  Here is the event talking about, it is pretty interesting:

 

Watching the video you'll understand why, also, if you want to try new Windows Terminal, you need to be on the (at the moment of wittering) latest Insider version of Windows 10 (past May 2019 Update that coming up). And you'll also see why it would be theoretically be possible to now have a Linux made Terminal, be able to run under Windows and interact with the OS, despite not being designed for Windows.

[DeScruff]

I'm not hatin on the emojis,
But I do have to ask... why? and why? I guess we will be seeing like:
 

Quote

C:\Users\Admin\Desktop> DoSomething.bat
Manipulating Modal Memory...
Preparing Captive Simulators...
Reticulating Splines...
...
Operation success! :D - you may close the window.

(There is supposed to be emojis in Operation success line)

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Sypran said:

I'm not hatin on the emojis,
But I do have to ask... why? and why? I guess we will be seeing like:
 

(There is supposed to be emojis in Operation success line)

For some reason people have wanted emojis. Not sure why but whatever. 

The thing is that by changing the character encoding to UTF 8 you get full support for unicode. This is great because that includes a ton of characters which doesn't exist in ASCII, for example the Swedish characters åäö. 

To me, emoji support is kind of a biproduct from supporting more languages such as Chinese. I'm sure Microsoft sees it the same way. 

[vorticalbox]

On 5/7/2019 at 7:10 AM, Nowak said:

Between this and Microsoft shipping a full Linux kernel within Windows, I believe they're either admitting defeat in some way or trying to make Windows more attractive to developers.

 

Probably the latter.

I believe Microsoft is slowing migrating over to the Linux kernel and not telling anyone.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

On 5/7/2019 at 7:42 AM, Screen said:

The terminal can be tested out right now and is opensource, along with the terminal a new mono-type based font is also getting developed by Microsoft which is also, once again Open Source.

does that mean it will be ported to linux? that would be cool to have. 

[GoodBytes]

3 hours ago, firelighter487 said:

does that mean it will be ported to linux? that would be cool to have. 

Ported? yes.

Direct compile and run for native release? No. It uses DirectX and WPF GUI framework to start with. So some work will be required to port it to Linux. But it can technically work.

 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

27 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Ported? yes.

Direct compile and run for native release? No. It uses DirectX and WPF GUI framework to start with. So some work will be required to port it to Linux. But it can technically work.

oh ok cool. i hope it will support the powershell linux port etc too. that would be really nice to have in a native terminal. 

[GoodBytes]

17 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

oh ok cool. i hope it will support the powershell linux port etc too. that would be really nice to have in a native terminal. 

Powershell and windows commands cannot be ported. I suggest you check out the video I posted above.

Once ported, all you'll get are the Windows Terminal features. You'll type in Linux terminal commands, and PowerShell and Command Prompt (as well as the WSL stuff (well you are already in Linux in the distro of your choice)) will be gone.

 

As the video would explain, PowerShell and Command Prompt cannot be ported as in the Linux/Unix world everything works via files and things go through pipes. In Windows everything is object based and interacts with APIs. 2 drastically different models.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

2 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Powershell and windows commands cannot be ported.

Microsoft thinks they can be ported though.... 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-6

it's not complete powershell, like some commands are missing but most of it is there. 

[GoodBytes]

8 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

Microsoft thinks they can be ported though.... 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-6

it's not complete powershell, like some commands are missing but most of it is there. 

This is PowerShell Core for Linux. Not the same as PowerShell terminal window in Windows, and not the same as the command line shell PowerShell 1 through 6 which the PowerShell terminal windows runs on to interact with PowerShell.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

2 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

This is PowerShell Core for Linux. Not the same as PowerShell terminal window in Windows, and not the same as the command line shell PowerShell 1 through 6.

interesting. i didn't know that. 

[just that pc guy]

aw man if it looks like chrome how will i be able to impress my noob friends by spamming systeminfo in cmd

[jasonvp]

Well, I have it built.  But, I don't have Win 10 1903 yet as it's not available for Gen release as far as I can tell.  So the terminal is parked until I can update.

 

Grrr.

[GoodBytes]

22 minutes ago, jasonvp said:

Well, I have it built.  But, I don't have Win 10 1903 yet as it's not available for Gen release as far as I can tell.  So the terminal is parked until I can update.

 

Grrr.

You need more than 1903 (19H1). You need 20H1

[trag1c]

I am actually digging the linux support and the new terminal. Being able to target windows and linux without multiple machines, multiple boots, or without connecting to VM's is very attractive. Especially considering no one can compete with Visual Studio yet.

[Guest]

On 5/7/2019 at 8:18 PM, SlimyPython said:

What's the point of that may i ask?

Terminal is lit af.  

[indrora]

On 5/7/2019 at 2:18 AM, SlimyPython said:

What's the point of that may i ask?

Lots of reasons. It's useful to remember that emojis are, internally, characters like the latin letter a, the greek letter ζ, the cyrillic letter Д, the ideograph ヅ, or the arabic script letter ك.

There's a lot of things that Conhost (the process that hosts the shell itself) has had in the past that have been broken. For instance, for a long time, if your system was in English (US) and your WSL environment happened to be in English (Germany), all sorts of tools would produce garbage until you changed your windows locale to English (German).

 

So, the reasons to bring up full Unicode support in the terminal:

• Lots of dev tools use emoji -- for a variety of reasons. Python and Node tooling especially love emoji, since the languages have native support for any unicode character. Swift as well, since you can name a variable an emoji.
• Mixed-locale software is easier to use in WSL.
• Tools like ssh and such work fine
• Japanese users don't need a butchered environment where you have to mentally translate from \ to ¥
• Japanese text renders correctly in mixed-widhth (half/fullwidth) environments
• Bidirectional users can have working bidirectional text (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)
• Powershell cmdlets for Active Directory can now easily take the name "Martin Grüßer" without silly hacks to make it work

Emoji here is really a happy side effect of having full unicode support and fallback font rendering. This means tools like PoSh Git can use arrows and other unicode characters when you are ahead/behind/etc.

[Jito463]

On 5/7/2019 at 12:42 AM, Screen said:

The new Windows Terminal app boasts a a clean, tabbed UI, full Unicode support (yes, including emoji)

 

[GoodBytes]

40 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

 

Microsoft heard you. They'll also add GIF support.

 

Please don't revive old threads unless you'll contribute something substantial.

[Jito463]

5 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Microsoft heard you. They'll also add GIF support

Sadly, I'm inclined to believe you, even though I know you're only joking.