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Microsoft Windows IT Technology

Microsoft's New Windows Terminal Is Now Available (howtogeek.com) 115

Posted by msmash from the about-time dept.
You can now download a preview version of the new Windows Terminal app from the Store on Windows 10. From a report: Microsoft released this application on the evening of June 21 after a listing showed up earlier that day. After downloading the Windows Terminal app from the Store, you can take advantage of all the new features-- including tabs, finally! You can combine tabs from the traditional Command Prompt, Linux Bash instances, and PowerShell in the same window. It's a deeply customizable environment, too.
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Microsoft's New Windows Terminal Is Now Available More

Microsoft's New Windows Terminal Is Now Available

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  • Based on the screenshot, Microsoft finally made a clone of a Midnight Commander clone.
    • Microsoft, now with Linux, blackjack, and hookers! In fact, forget the Microsoft.

      • Microsoft, now with Linux, blackjack, and hookers! In fact, forget the Microsoft.

        Now that Microsoft has embraced Linix, and extended it with blackjack and hookers, what comes next?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bjwest ( 14070 )
      Midnight Commander is a clone of Norton Commander, not an original file manager.
    • there is a windows build of mc on sourceforge, it was sorely disappointing, junk files could not be deleted, it was basically a file viewer since you could not do anything with it other than browse around on your system

  • I've not used Windows for some time so I am not sure what the current UNIX utility scene is like there - does this Windows Terminal app running Bash mean that most other UNIX utilities are already installed as well?

    • Re:Does this totally replace Cygwin? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Monday June 24, 2019 @06:15PM (#58817114)

      I've not used Windows for some time so I am not sure what the current UNIX utility scene is like there - does this Windows Terminal app running Bash mean that most other UNIX utilities are already installed as well?

      No, it's part of support for Linux Subsystem for Windows, which lets you run Linux programs on Windows (initially through emulating the Linux syscall interface, now through a VM with a real Linux kernel). Thus to run bash and all that you needed to install a Linux distribution that ran on Windows, like Ubuntu. This gave you the entire Ubuntu command line userland (complete with apt-get), minus some features like init/cron and other daemon support.

      So yes, you would replace Cygwin with this - I did on all my Windows 10 machines because the Ubuntu environment is better supported and easier to update. It also requires some thinking at times because it works at the syscall level, so things that might not work usually don't because they're some oddball syscall they use. Linux networking tools, for instance, syscall into the kernel to do things, so most of them don't work.

    • This article isn't about Linux on Windows. Windows is trying to shift more toward how Linux handles terminals. Windows has traditionally had GUI apps and console apps which determined if the app had a console window opened and stdout displayed in it. Linux just treats all apps the same and only displays console text if the app is already attached to a terminal. The latest Windows 10 allows for this Linux-like terminal model meaning you can officially have a non-conhost app hosting a console (unofficially th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        I think Cygwin will be quite at home under this new console subsystem and Terminal app. There is still a place for cygwin, especially among folk who want to use bash and script Windows, but don't want to install a full Linux distro in a mini-vm, which is what WSL2 is.

    • I'm not clear on the implications of this new terminal thing, but I switched from CygWin to Microsoft's Linux subsystem several years ago. I've installed lots of things via appget, mostly command-line based, but some gui-based (with the help of an XWin program). I've not had any problems with it, except that I can't copy-paste with the keyboard. I'm told that's coming. There are some limitations, but none that affect what I use it for.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      No. In fact Cygwin would run nicely inside of this new terminal and console subsystem.

    • The Windows Bash shell isn't fully integrated with the OS, it's more like running a Linux VM from Windows. You can access files from your Windows drives from within Bash, but it's clunky.

  • Finally? (Score:3)

    by kaoshin ( 110328 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:20PM (#58816726)
    Nice that they made something people might want, but unless I'm missing something, this functionality has existed for years in the form of add-on software such as Console https://sourceforge.net/projec... [sourceforge.net]

    • Re:Finally? (Score:4, Informative)

      by chrish ( 4714 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @08:49AM (#58820262) Homepage

      Christophe Bucher forked Console when it was abandoned, and made it work better on modern versions of Windows. They've also been fixing bugs and adding features: https://github.com/cbucher/con... [github.com]

      The new Windows terminal looks like it might end up OK, but it's missing a lot (a LOT) of features, including a settings dialog.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        If youâ(TM)re commandline-heavy, also look into the guy who invented 4DOS:

        https://jpsoft.com/ [jpsoft.com]

        Thereâ(TM)s also a free version called TCC/LE that will extend the CMD functionality.

  • Finally! (Score:2)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    GPU accelerated text rendering engine

    Really? Is this the breakthrough feature to finally bring countless administrators and users to the windows command line? Has rendering text without a GPU been slowing down our systems?

    • Has rendering text without a GPU been slowing down our systems?

      Yes. Where commands wait to proceed until output has been printed, it actually does that.

    • As many old-timers know, text mode is FAST. The entire screen buffer was at most 8000 bytes (for 80x50 color mode) and could be updated very fast. We watched as the GUI's came.. and we watched our terminal/console windows chug along slowly under them compared to text mode.

      A fun exercise is to disable your video driver, open a console window, and display a big text file. I know you cant believe your eyes after doing it. Its unbearable.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dissy ( 172727 )

      Has rendering text without a GPU been slowing down our systems?

      Emoji's and Unicode are both supported and utilized in the new terminal too.
      It renders emoji's as images. Unicode has a bit more in it than just a 24 million character lookup table these days too.

      Technically yes it would use CPU resources that could be doing other things, which is what "a slow down" means, although it's doubtful it would be a noticeable slowdown to a human.

      Still, it makes some sense to have your graphics processor doing the work for processing graphics even if your general processor is cap

  • Copy and Paste (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does it finally allow Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V instead of having to use the alt menu?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Well, the good news is they seem to know their selection model is messed up and plan to work on it more.

      The bad news is that for now, they have yet another selection/copy/paste set of behaviors.
      -If you click once while focused, it will select a single character.
      -Paste is right click
      -Copy is also right click (if text selected, copy, if not selected paste, combine with the 'click selects a single character and I lost a pastebuffer because it copied when I wanted to paste).
      -There are no working keyboard shorcu

  • I mean did people actually want this? Why did MS spend time and money on this?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I mean did people actually want this? Why did MS spend time and money on this?

      Yes people did ask for this. Server administrators and devops asked for this. Microsoft has been moving to powershell commandline administration for years. We have also enjoyed using linux utilities while managing AD systems with the WSL.

      It's pretty great to have them in the same place just like its pretty great to use the same commands on all your servers in a mixed environment.

  • With a 30 year late update to this, does anyone know if it has ANSI sequence support activated by default at least?

  • A quick review... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @07:28PM (#58817526)

    It needs a lot of work and at least they seem to recognize that, but at a glance:
    -The window drag behavior is very odd, you just have a very small target to work with.
    -The keyboard shortcuts look promising, but a lot of them don't work yet
    -It is generally a bit glitchy and crashy
    -The acrylic effect strangely toggles between active and solid based on being active/inactive (evidently a windows wide thing, calculator does the same thing but it's acrylic is so subtle it's hard to notice anyway).
    -There are some general rough UI design issues (e.g. things just don't look very clean and when maximized it cuts off text).
    -The acrylic effect is pleasant for eye candy, though as others have pointed out, less functional. I am surprised that the MS team says they don't know how to do non-acrylic transparency, despite the standard conhost being able to do that. Of course conhost transparency also impacts the foreground (whole window) so maybe they have a real limitation.
    -Line rewrap on resize is good (better than mintty for example)

    It's no where near Konsole or Gnome Terminal yet. It represents a good step in the right direction in a platform where all the terminals suck in various ways. Either it will be a good terminal or the underlying reworks to allow Terminal to work well will help enable a good third-party alternative.

  • I am sure we will all remember what we were doing when such a momentous development was made public.

  • Next, they'll "invent" the third mouse button.

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