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Just use ConEmu (or get off Windows) if you need a terminal. It's still far more fully-featured than the Console Host will ever be.

The stagnation in cmd.exe (and even PowerShell) appears to be a casualty of Microsoft assuming that point-and-click would take over the world completely, which clearly hasn't happened in development. I still shake my head at the ops nightmare that is RDPing into hosted Windows Servers.

As one of the sibling posts here notes, there's really no reason to use Windows Server for anything, unless you have legacy applications to support. They're going to have to do a lot, lot more to make this a competitor.



> I still shake my head at the ops nightmare that is RDPing into hosted Windows Servers.

Can you elaborate? I have all of my boxes saved in the MSFT RDP manager doodad (before which I used RoyalTS or seomthing). When I want to get on it I double click and it logs me in and there it is - a fully featured interface from which I can do whatever admin I need opening up the relevant tools etc using the point and click you dislike so much.


Probably that logging in snip-snap, one-server-at-a-time, and click-clicking on various boxes in the (admittedly convenient) GUI leads to a bunch of unique snowflake[0] servers that are prone to drift. If each server is doing one thing, that's obviously ok, but if you have 1000 web servers then treating them as immutable (aka phoenixes[1]) is conventional devops wisdom[2].

[0] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/devops/en...

[1] https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/moving-to-phoenix...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226099


if your doing that, I would recommend powershell DSC.


It's odd though that they lean so heavily on PowerShell now, and still don't have a good first-party terminal to run it in.


The powershell terminal is a little better than the normal CMD shell, but there's some weird stuff there... Why are they still using the block selection for copy-paste? Never has that been what I wanted


A Slashdot comment (to this link) provided good context why the current console sucks:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=367...

That's from a ReactOS developer.


Whoa, that was a surprisingly interesting thread. (Not so much the console part, but the other questions he answered.)


It was quite reasonable 25-odd years ago - which, until recently, was probably about when anybody last touched the code...

(To make line-based copying and pasting work I would imagine they had to do some quite invasive surgery at some point... the idea that the window is backed by a screen buffer that's a fixed-size grid of (attribute,character) pairs is exposed quite openly in the API.)


That was fixed by conhost improvements in Windows 10. Selection is line based now.


What do you think of Powershell ISE?




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