IIRC you could resize the standard cmd console easily, just type "mode 160" (or whatever width you want). I don't have a Windows installation around to check it, but maybe someone can confirm?
All functionality used to reside in conhost.exe, no matter which character mode application you used (command prompt or PowerShell), which is why a lot of commands would work for both character modes. This is not how things work now (though a lot of commands are still shared, like “mode 120,120”) as conhost.exe now just decides if it should give you the legacy console host or the new one (with things like buffer improvements and word wrapping).
There are a lot of subtle improvements I think many are not aware of, like, if you paste in text with smart quotes they will be changed to straight quotes.
Most Windows terminal people use ConEmu rather than the inbuilt terminal apps - it's like iTerm2 vs Terminal.app on MacOS. ConEmu adds Unix style cut and paste, tabs, etc. Add openssh, PSReadLine and PSCX and you've got a proper terminal setup.
Also MS should really improve the inbuilt apps to do this stuff.
I've used iTerm and Terminal on Mac, and the default Windows Terminal (conhost), PuTTY sand MinTTY on Windows.
Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost, even after the Windows 10 update. It's fast, supports a ton of thoughtful features (such as customizable title bars via extended ANSI codes, real line wrapping during resize, good Unicode support from the very beginning, etc.). With Terminal.app I can be quite happy and productive even with someone else's Mac or with the default settings. I've used iTerm2 but their features weren't compelling enough for me, and the iTerm font rendering is noticeably worse in many ways. Apple has also been very good about giving Terminal.app continuous updates.
On Windows though I have almost always had to install MinTTY or something just to get a halfway usable terminal emulator. The default emulator is just so limited - Unicode support is very plug and pray, the title bar is totally locked, and having to use Windows APIs to change text formatting is a pain. Conhost is also amazingly slow when it comes to large amounts of text, so much so that printf can be extremely detrimental to program performance just because it has to wait for the terminal window to catch up.
PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions. That means that in practice I often pop open cmd.exe even if PS is a better choice, just because I don't want to sit through a long load time.
Microsoft really should get their Terminal story in order. I'll definitely try out ConEmu the next time I sit in front of a Windows box, but like you I wish MS would improve their own apps!
I once started a Chinese character flash card program in Python on Windows.
The yak shaving was unbelievable. I never got a working version, but I learned a lot about code pages, and why "building a console from scratch" is not actually the right answer to "I want to be able to test a toy program I'm making before it's finished."
> PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions.
Small price to pay to be able to pipe objects, man!
Sorry about that - we lost control of our startup times in PS V3 and have been working to get it back under control. PowerShell V5 had substantial improvements but we keep working on it and V5.1 is even faster. Give it a try - I think you'll like it.
I'm not entirely sure if you're joking or not (one of the hazards of the textual communication medium). Yes, piping objects is fun and occasionally very useful, but waiting ten seconds to pop a terminal so I can run `ipconfig` or something is not so useful.
Are you actually able to not be confused by piping objects? In Unix everything is a string so I just pipe text to sort and then unique...etc. PS always complains relentlessly. The GUI features and .NET integration is nice though.
⌃⇥ actually does work in Terminal.app. And in fact, ⌃⇥ and ⌃⇧⇥ are the official keyboard shortcuts in the menu, with ⌘{ and ⌘} being undocumented aliases. This is also how Safari works too.
Whilst I am glad to hear about ConEmu; I have to disagree, I use windows cmd.exe very regularly, and know lots of other people that do, and I have never used ConEmu before! I might give it a try now I know about it.
ConEmu si really nice simply because you can have tabs, split pane and good color schemes. 've never gotten to the level that some people need, so ConEmu + bash = everything I was using on OSX.
My work laptop still runs Windows 7 - and will for the foreseeable future - but that is one of the things that make me curious about Windows 10. It is, of course, easy to ridicule Microsoft for how long it took them to change this, but I think better late than never.
(On older versions of Windows, ConEmu[1] does that, too, but it's third-party software, of course. It also supports tabs!)
> If you have trouble with anything I am happy to help. But you will have much better chances to find solutions on the pages of the upstream projects. Those are:
Console emulator ~ Conemu (https://conemu.github.io/)
Cmd.exe enhancements ~ clink (https://mridgers.github.io/clink/)
Unix tools on windows ~ git for windows (https://git-for-windows.github.io/)
Correct me if i am wrong, but all i remember is you could edit the width somewhere in the options. But there was no way to change the width _on the fly_ (assuming thats something it does now)
Thanks for that suggestion. I am well aware of these options, and if I used Windows at home, I could utilize these. However, I only use Windows when I have to, which is at work. The environment in which I work, you can absolutely not install software like this, as you would be breaking security protocols (and the law).
So this explains the joy I feel over small improvements like those mentioned above.
You could do it at least in Win7, maybe earlier, do not have anything older to test with. Click on icon (right click on top bar) --> properties --> layout. You can edit both window size and buffer size
It also support transparency and lot more features.
Install sysinternals, chocolatey (a package manager, https://chocolatey.org) and python, you are good to go.
You just needed to go in to the properties of the window and increase the screen buffer size (both width and height). It's one of the first things I'd do upon installing a Windows machine.
I have been waiting for that for years - now if they would only add TABS to real powershell (as opposed to powershell ISE) or if they can add colors to powershell ISE I will be super-duper-bonus happy.
I've found ConEmu's xterm emulation to be frustratingly buggy if I'm ssh-ing into a Linux machine and running tmux, vim, or really anything with colors or a status bar. mintty [1] works a lot better for me. (mintty is also the console that's packaged with Git for Windows.)
also CTRL+V pastes by default now, but yea you're no longer locked into half the screen by default. I wonder why that's been like that for so long? Must be some reason...
> Every idea for a feature starts out with an imaginary deficit of -100 points. That means it has to demonstrate a significant net-positive effect on the product as a whole in order to emerge as being truly worthy of consideration.
That is actually pretty interesting, thanks for linking!
I still dont understand how this was not "fixed" years ago, sure some config windows have fixed widths because it makes sense, but something as a terminal obviously needs the ability to grow (or shrink), especially after they introduced sticky windows and people actually used "tiling"
The idea that the console screen is an MxN matrix is pretty embedded in the API... it's not a MDA display adapter metaphor, not a Unix-style typewriter. I'm guessing they just felt they had bigger fish to fry.
(Everybody I know that uses the console window a lot has always just set the window to 120x9999 or 160x9999 or whatever and forgotten about it. It's one of those things that's obviously kind of lame, but after a while you just forget about it.)
