terminal

> Is VLC really "complex software" The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built. [^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687 [^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...

what about https://github.com/microsoft/terminal you use that too right? you better!

Some parts have already been open-sourced. For example, the console host component has been open sourced here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal And the FAT filesystem driver: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/mai... And also PowerShell: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell And most of .NET: https://github.com/dotnet Maybe they could consider an Apple-style approach: open source the core of the kernel and text-mode user space but leave the GUI closed. Of course, open sourcing everything would be even better, but that might too big of a step for them. Open sourcing the non-GUI core could be a good initial step, whether or not it ends up going further.

Windows' terminal has integration directly with WSL2; https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

cmd.exe or the new https://github.com/microsoft/terminal ?

A quick off-the-cuff remark based solely on the title: in 2024, I think the state of the terminal has never been better, in large part to Microsoft making a high quality terminal easily available to everyone on Windows [1] As an application author, I love being able to assume that all major platforms have a good terminal and that my favorite terminal rendering libraries should Just Work on all of them [1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440 > "Thank you so much to everyone for engaging with this feature exploration! Your passion has generated a ton of excitement in our own team, and I’m happy to share our proposed direction, which is that we will work with Malcolm Smith (malxau), the maintainer of Yedit, to ship Edit in Windows! We plan to do this by forking the Yedit code to a new OSS repo on GitHub, under Microsoft (like terminal or powertoys)." YEdit being an MIT licensed open-source recreation of the MS-DOS 5 editor, by a Microsoft employee: http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

> convince management of the value This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate. There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves. Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issue

At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point. Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

"Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version." More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server. They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo. I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content. An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued. If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright. If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also w

Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400 VS.Code's supports smooth scrolling in both the editor and terminal window, but it's off by default. There's settings for it.