Making Windows Terminal awesome
Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what’s to come for the Windows command line experience.
Discussion
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Ganlet
2020-08-01T00:13:47Z ago
In the podcast, it’s suggested that Window’s accept forward slash in order to win over Linux users. Powershell already supports this, try “dir c:/users/”
Jerod Santo
Bennington, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party & takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2020-08-04T14:02:40Z ago
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Following up on your comment, I found this issue where it was proposed to make that the default, but no dice.
Jonathan Duck
2020-09-02T19:18:14Z ago
Linux uses those same terms for terminal and shell.
Terminal (emulator) pretends to be the hardware of the old teletype terminals. When you Ctrl+Alt+F_ on Linux, those are called psudo-terminals. They take the input and pass it to the shell via stdin, and display stdout and stderr.
The shell is the software you interact with inside the terminal. eg: bash (aka Bourne again shell) takes the input from the terminal and lets you type your command then runs what you say.
Jerod Santo
Bennington, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party & takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2020-09-03T13:26:27Z ago
Well said!
What is the “command-line” then? Literally the place where you type your commands into the terminal and have them passed to the shell for execution?
Jonathan Duck
2020-09-03T18:28:41Z ago
🤷‍♂️ Not sure, but that sounds about right to me. I guess you could think about it as the combination of the terminal and the shell, which would be the place you type your commands.
Oded Arbel
2020-12-29T11:59:18Z ago
“command line” or “command prompt” are logical things - i.e there aren’t actual parts that are these things, it’s more of a state of mind.
Your definition is probably fine, but if I’d try to be formal about it then I’d say that “being at the command prompt” or “command line” is the state where the shell has presented a command prompt (sent it to the terminal for display) and we are now waiting on the user to figure out what text to send back to the shell.