> their Mac set up is all sorts of broken and buggy. I can hear legit sadness in their voice.

I'm normally very happy with the dev experience on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I run iTerm2 (multiple split panes in a window), zsh/ohmyzsh, homebrew, and VSCode. The new APFS filesystem is insanely fast, especially when combined with VSCode's ripgrep-based text search. I watch my Windows-based colleagues start a VSCode text search in our repo and it takes 10-15 seconds to complete. Me - it's usually less than 5 seconds and often instant. Also, moving/copying/deleting large directories (i.e. 25k+ files) is unbelievably fast.

So macOS is great, in my opinion. But I'm often frustrated with this machine: (a) the keyboard is unreliable - certain keys develop habits of not responding (the `fn` key is currently driving me round the bend), (b) it crashes every time the battery runs low, and (c) my corporate policy installs Sophos which sometimes slows it to an absolute crawl.

From many developers' perspective, Windows' greatest downfall is that it's, well, still Windows. There is so much legacy to maintain, and so many ways that it differs from macOS and Linux at low levels. WSL and the new terminal/PTY are making inroads, but if Microsoft would only fork Debian and build their own supported distro, I can guess that's where we'd all be going very soon. What if they forked Wine as well and built a supported Windows compatibility layer on top?

Hey Nick. I'm the PM for Windows Terminal, and formerly, WSL:

Thanks for your thoughts on WSL & the new Terminal.

Re. release mechanisms, etc: Terminal will be delivered via the Store so we can ship out-of-band.

We're aiming to deliver new Terminal preview builds every 2 weeks or so which, since we're delivering via the Store, will auto-upgrade everyone soon after each release.

Re. Insiders: We do NOT gather any personally identifiable information. We only collect anonymized statistics about some of the features you use and/or issues you experience. Why? To ensure that we can find and fix issues as effectively as possible.

For example, with WSL, we collect the number of times an un-implemented syscall is called, or # of times a syscall returns an unexpected error. We couldn't care less WHO experiences these issues, only how OFTEN they occur. This info (esp. combined with bug reports in our repo, etc.) has been essential in helping us prioritize which syscalls are being called, which we've implemented, which are failing, and thus, which we need to pay attention to. Without this info, we wouldn't have been able to make WSL as good as it is.

We understand the community's concern about data collection - heck, EVERYONE should be - but in the general scheme of things, I think it fair to say that Microsoft's telemetry data collection is pretty well contained and is not egregious.

If you'd like to see what telemetry is being collected, on your machines, this may be of help: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...

HTH.

I'm on OSX and I have to have a docker container up and running in order to do development. GNU v. BSD tooling just isn't cutting it, and that's actually (IMHO) what's stealing market share from OSX.

They got windows+linux users in the first place by pre-installing curl+ssh, now their version of ls, find, and bash are all holding back those same windows+linux users.

> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows.

Each of the last few major updates have added more and more control over this. The latest release is allowing even more user control.

Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.

At some point MS, as the maker of the largest consumer OS, has a responsibility to patch critical vulnerabilities. Balancing the need to keep users secure with the inconvenience of a reboot, and the feelings of lack of control that come with it, is not an easy task.

On the opposite side, I've been frequently annoyed when Windows, unable to install an update, turns my computer on in the middle of the night, fails to install, and keeps the machine on. Lovely way to waste electricity, error messages are silent, and I had to run a command line power management tool to determine why my machine was waking up every night at 1am.

> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows.

I've been using exclusively Windows 10, for 2 years at work and more at home, not once had I an uncontrolled reboot. Perhaps rebooting at least once a week help.

Also, there is very little innovation in the OS space. While 10 years ago it fealt as if Apple was seriously pushing OS X, it seems to be more in a maintenance mode now. The only larger innovation was APFS, a welcome addition, but primarily developed for iOS.

The end of OSX was signaled by the iPad. When the iPad ended up just a large phone and not running a real OS for getting shit done, it was clear where Apple wanted to head.

I recommended the MacBook Pro for development and school purposes to family members and friends but am now in serious regret after keyboard issues developed in short time.

I like the older macbook pro keyboard, just before the keys became completely flat.

The keys were a concave curved shape so they were comfortable to your finger pads and tactile so that you could center your finger on they key by touch.

Since then, it's been form over function.

If you're OK with limiting your computer interactions to the 20th century, then yes, there's no reason not to run Linux directly. The most awesome thing about the WSL/Win10/Surface combo, though is that I get all the best features of Windows, including support for touch & pen, and all the best features of a real Linux box (which does make it way easier to keep your dev env like your deploy env.) I will never go back to a "caveman computer" that I can't write on to sketch and take notes in OneNote or similar apps. No Mac can offer that capability at any price.

> cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt,

in cmd.exe

type somefile.txt | sort /unique > output.txt

or in powershell

type file.txt | sort -unique

Powershell is obscenely powerful, it is equal to anything Bash can do plus:

1. It sends objects instead of streams, so instead of relying on fixed width output and string splitting, you can specify which column(s) of output you want from a tool directly

2. It can pull data from all sources of sources, including databases, WMI, COM sources and more.

3. Fully plugged into automation for servers, rich auto-complete, and a native ecosystem that is designed to all work together.

4. It can call into .NET libraries

But even cmd.exe can handle outputting text and sorting it!

> When I can do this in windows (unix command line): cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt

There are a lot of responses of the form "you can do this similar command in WSL/PowerShell/etc.," where that similar command will not run on a standard Unix-based system. I think that misses half of the point. One of the reasons a lot of programmers use OS X is specifically because you don't need separate sets of commands for the desktop and Linux cloud server (obviously, Linux gets even closer).

It's been possible to do a lot of stuff from the Windows command line for a long time. The problem has been that to do so effectively, many teams have to maintain a .bat alongside the .sh that will be used in production.

"When I can do this in windows (unix command line): cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt, then it'll become a threat"

I take it you haven't tried WSL in the last couple of years?

  cat .\somefile.txt | sort | unique | add-content "sortfile.txt"

I mean really it's not that hard to learn the actual PS syntax instead of the aliases:

  get-content .\somefile.txt | sort-object | get-unique | add-content .\sortfile.txt

I would suggest you check out WSL (if you're running Win10, just install your favorite distro from the store).

Not only can you do operate your typical one-liners but if the package is basically command line driven you can just apt-get install it and go.

There is a remaining wart that I hit from time to time, if I have a git repo that I want to talk to both from the WSL window and from a Git Shell (Cygwin app), the line endings get tweaked. It can be managed but it is still annoying.

Like this?

    me@thinkpad:~/
    $ cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt

    me@thinkpad:~/
    $ uname -r
    4.4.0-17763-Microsoft

You can do that easily through WSL. (Powershell can do the equivalent too, but of course with different syntax)

Surely you jest. You can't possibly think that you can't do that in Windows.

That is some serious BS - PowerShell is better then any other shell now. Its literally designed by UNIX people. Even your example is now shorter in PS then in bash.

Does that mean they are giving up on the syscall emulation thing?

The whole thing of WSL was it that contained no Linux kernel at all.

Does that mean one can mount ext drives now?

Does that mean that Docker for Windows will no longer require Hyper-V? And therefore will be available for Windows home editions?

Indeed.

I've been running WSL for over a year with Docker for Windows and while the experience feels native to WSL (WSL has no problem running the Docker CLI and connecting to Docker for Windows) it'll be a very nice perk to just apt install Docker in WSL and not deal with DfW.

This is a hard problem for commandline applications unfortunately. Think about pasting text with Ctrl+V. Lots of existing commandline applications bind particular actions to Ctrl+V - should the terminal application always eat the Ctrl+V keypress to handle pasting?

This is why we added support to optionally set Ctrl+Shift+V as the paste keybinding in conhost.

Fortunately, the Windows Terminal doesn't have a lot of the legacy to maintain like conhost does, so it'll support setting paste to whatever keybinging you like :)

Copy/paste works: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-windows-10-command...

You mean pasting in smart quotes instead of real quotes causing maddening issues that are hard to track down?

The new Terminal actually does _crazy_ well. The vintage console on windows, conhost.exe, uses GDI to draw to the window. Unfortunately, GDI is CPU-bound, so drawing the screen actually slows down our processing of the text.

With the Windows Terminal, we've switched to a DX/DWrite based renderer, which no longer uses the CPU to draw text, and moves it to the GPU. Our preliminary testing has a insane perf improvement for applications writing lots of text, something like 10x faster :)

It draws to a VGA style character grid, like it was a DOS/VGA machine from the 80's. Oddly enough, Unix is older than that, and got it right (abstracted from hardware).

Proper resizing has existed in the console as long as Windows 10 has been out, and we've been aggressivly improving our copy-paste story. Ctrl+C/V to copy in cmd has been around since Windows 10, and Ctrl+Shift+V to paste in WSL was added just last year.

It's a techcruch article, not exactly quality reporting. I'm not really sure why so many people link to them when there's usually a better source for most stories (unless the story is merely rumor).

Do you have a specific example on Mac? Reflowing of text always seems to be way better on Mac than Linux. I use Windows least often, but always felt the experience was significantly worse than the other two.

Good music players on any platform: vlc, smplayer, clementine....

You can have everything now on all 3, everything important. I almost never use non-cross platform tools.

It's so bad it's good?

LARGE portions of the new terminal's codebase are taken straight from the code of the existing conhost.exe, so hopefully we'll keep all the performance we already had.

This is an absolutely epic post you've linked, I'll make sure to share with the team.

Ironically, this is actually a behavior lots of developers do want.

The new Terminal fortunately gives us much more flexibility for customizing it's behavior with user settings, so we'll be able to support either pausing output or not, depending on what the user prefers.

Yeah, I've been caught out by this a few times. I've since acquired the habit of pressing Escape to de-select if I think something might be selected.

Are you saying the app itself actually freezes? Or does the terminal not automatically scroll with the new app output?

LOL yea, seems like the media embargo ended before the actual announcement.

We don't have a link to share quite yet. The first preview builds that will be available from the store will be coming soon(tm). The "now available" part seems to be referencing a part of Jha's keynote that I don't want to spoil quite yet :)

Yes it's using ConPTY as a backend, which means all Windows commandline apps will work in it out of the box.

Nope!

Lol I should have updated that issue - in the most recent Windows release, we added a feature to conhost to actually disable the overscroll (under Properties... Terminal... Disable Scroll-Forward). See [this blog post](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/new-experimental-...)

This is seriously my biggest ask of the new Terminal - once the chaos of Build slows down a bit, it's next on my to-do list :)

It's all C++ code. We're using the relatively new XAML Islands framework to allow us to host UWP XAML content in a Win32 process. A lot of the core is C++/WinRT, which is magic that lets you call most WinRT (UWP) APIs from C++ without having to deal with CX.

I'd say the vast majority of the codebase is pure C++, without the C++/winrt magic.

The renderer we're using is DX-based, which provides a pretty substantial perf improvement over the old GDI-based one conhost uses.

Yes it does support full RGB colored text.

As far as bidi text, the underlying console implementation isn't quite there yet, though it it high up on our radar of things to work on.

just to answer my own question in case anyone's interested https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/ looks like it is a VM they're using rather than the WSL1 emulation approach.

We don't quite yet, but hopefully soon it will :)

The best part of working on the Terminal is that we can feel free to add new features to it's codebase without breaking backwards compatibility, which why such a feature was never added to conhost in the first place

When you say "file system slowness issues", I'm assuming you mean for WSL, right?

I believe they have a big announcement later today that I don't want to spoil quite yet :)

This is a new _Terminal_ application, which is akin to conhost.exe.

Powershell, cmd.exe, WSL, they're all unaffected by this change. They all run the same in the new terminal as they did in the old one, thanks to the powerful magic of [ConPty](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...)

Actually we spent MONTHS debating the pros and cons of adding a sudo on Windows.

Curiously, Windows is more secure than linux because it _doesn't_ have a sudo.

In Windows, any application can set messages to another window at the same integrity level with SendMessage/PostMessage.

If you had a `sudo` on windows, you could have a medium-IL terminal window which is talking to a high-IL process (running with the hypothetical sudo), and any other medium-il process could drive the console, effectively creating an escalation of privilege attack vector.

Its very much by design.

It IS open source!

https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal

Split panes is one of the things I want to see get done next personally!

I'd say if you're looking for linux commandline applications, I'd recommend the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which lets linux binaries run unmodified on Windows.

As far as package managers are concerned, I've had lots of success with Chocolatey. If developers are willing to port their commandline applications to Windows, then I'm sure they'd be welcome additions to Chocolatey

At the bottom of a MS Blog post[0] they link to a Github[1] page for it, but it's not open yet. It may just be an issue tracker though.

[0] https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2019/05/06/developing...

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal

What that means is we're using DX/DWrite for text rendering. The old console used GDI to render text, and GDI's text rendering was CPU bound.

By using the GPU for text rendering, we can process more text faster on the CPU, without the rendering of the text getting in the way.

If we're not already doing subpixel AA, then I think it's certainly something we could look into. I'm not really our DX guy, but it DX supports it, I think we could use it.

The existing console already has subpixel antialiasing, for a long time now. Check your font?

1. It's actually largely based off the original terminal on Windows, conhost.exe. We were able to re-use a lot of the codebase for the core of the implementation, with a thin new UI layer. This means that enhancements to the terminal will also help enhance the inbox console.

2. I spent a LOT of time looking at using xterm.js, and eventually decided against it. The main factor was that although it would provide us a nearly complete VT implementation, it was critically tied to the JS ecosystem, and no matter how much time we spent engineering it, we'd still be coupled to having a webview render text. So we instead decided to write it in C++, which meant that we'd initially have less VT compatibility, but our perf would be better in the long run.

I just looked at the Terminus project page[0] and I'm really impressed that they seem to have run an entire linux emulator in the browser just to show off a terminal.

[0]https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/

The design is actually super prototype-y right now. the UX team is still polishing the design, but I believe the final answer is yes, we'll be trying to be visually in-line with the new chromium-powered Edge

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm the right person to elaborate upon the extensions model. If our PM Rich shows up in this thread, hopefully he'll be able to elaborate. I'll point him this way, but as he's at the conference today, I doubt he'll get a chance to :/

FYI reinstalling windows, even with a fresh OEM USB, does not guarantee it will be a fresh copy of windows if there is bloatware living on the BIOS https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Just saying i5 or i7 is kind of meaningless, because it can be anything between a laptop dual core to a desktop octa core these days.

What's in the 19 additional tests Windows is running? Is the Linux box a laptop as well? I'm personally having trouble believing the Core 2 Duo in your MBP outperforms a modern i7, even after potential Windows overhead.

Sort of did that for a brand new X1 Carbon: 1.created a usb bootable image from MS's tool to install new windows

2.installed from scratch

3.the windows setup only put essential Lenovo stuff - hotkeys and thermal management.

4. ???

5. Profit [1]

It made a real difference to disable the automatic windows updates and run them manually. There were no bloatware installed on my unit.

[1] A joke from the memes, its all good otherwise.

Are you running the CI on windows 10 under WSL, or native?

Also BlackViper: http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-viper...

You can fix windows. My media centar runs on 10 for months. Just disable updates (not easily done nowdays tho) and store service which is resource hog.

Use some debloater to remove other stupid stuff. Then it will fly.

Yeah, at one point they put in a lot of work to get the power on to Windows screen up time fast. But it's a scam.. Windows is not done booting until the hard drive drops below being pegged at 100%, which takes another 4 minutes.

Really? In what regards?

Everyone I've ever seen using macOS doesn't use Terminal.app - iTerm is popular, I use Alacritty.

What Linux term isn't faster, if nothing else, than Terminal.app?

If you find cmder not to your liking, realize it's just a repackaging of https://conemu.github.io/ and Clink with a nice looking stylesheet. You might like vanilla ConEmu better (I did).