MS wants to open Terminal, Console, a Font, and so on

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theuserbl
Posts: 140
Joined: Wed Mar 23, 2005 3:49 pm

MS wants to open Terminal, Console, a Font, and so on

Post by theuserbl »

Microsoft is developing a new Terminal for Windows.
Here a promo-video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... gw0rXPMMPE

More information about it, you can find at
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandl ... -terminal/

The important parts
You will also have the option of using our new font! We wanted to create a fun, new, monospaced font to enhance the modern look and feel of the Terminal. Not only will this font include programming ligatures, but it will also be open sourced and have its own repository. Stay tuned for more information on the new font project!
As of today, the Windows Terminal and Windows Console have been made open source and you can clone, build, run, and test the code from the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal
We are excited to announce that we are open sourcing not just Windows Terminal, but also the Windows Console which hosts the command-line infrastructure in Windows and provides the traditional Console UX.
Greetings
theuserbl
Ancient
Posts: 82
Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:32 pm

Re: MS wants to open Terminal, Console, a Font, and so on

Post by Ancient »

Awful video, not certain if there is any advantage over Putty.
theuserbl
Posts: 140
Joined: Wed Mar 23, 2005 3:49 pm

Re: MS wants to open Terminal, Console, a Font, and so on

Post by theuserbl »

Now the presentation of the Microsoft Terminal on BUILD 2019 is online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMudkRcwjCw
Ancient wrote: Wed May 08, 2019 9:12 pm Awful video, not certain if there is any advantage over Putty.
I have never used Putty. But there are other OpenSource-Terminals for Windows like
- ConEmu
- Cmder, which is based on ConEmu
- the cmd.exe-enhancement Clink
- etc.

Why using the Microsoft Terminal?
Possibly it is later integrated in the system. So it is the same question as, why using calc.exe or notepad.exe.
For all of this existing good alternatives, but that programs are already integrated in Windows.

Greetings
theuserbl
hbelusca
Developer
Posts: 1204
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2009 10:36 pm
Location: Zagreb, Croatia

Re: MS wants to open Terminal, Console, a Font, and so on

Post by hbelusca »

The problem with the original 3rd-party terminals is that they used to use the ReadConsoleOutput(), WriteConsoleOutput(), ReadConsole() and WriteConsole() APIs in order to interface between the actual underlying console host subsystem and the user:

Code: Select all

conemu/cmder/whatever (what you see on the screen) <--| use Win32 console API |--> hidden regular windows console window (i.e. conhost.exe) || conhost <---> any text-mode app.
That first method is quite slow/inefficient because you loose some information when these console output APIs are used, and there is extra buffering going on, screenbuffer format conversion and so on...

More recently they added this ConPTY functionality, that conemu et al. started to use (on Windows 10):

Code: Select all

conemu/cmder/whatever (what you see on the screen) <--| ConPTY |--> direct conhost.exe (no hidden window stuff) <---> any text-mode app.
It looks great, because now you can take theoretically any existing terminal emulator and "port" it so that it interfaces with the ConPTY API, and then your terminal emulator receives standard VT sequences that are more accurate for representing the state of the output buffer (amongst other things).

This new Windows terminal uses also ConPTY, but also because they have (in the src/host subdirectory) the code of conhost.exe itself, it also becomes possible to write a 3rd-party conhost, as long as it otherwise provides an implementation of all the necessary APIs that text-mode applications expect.
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