[flabbergast]

Yeah, this 30 years old code-base.. besides it is questionable only dev's below 30yr old are working on it (age discrimination, or accidental?), hardly anything changed. If I want to copy something I still have to do the ancient mark and copy sequence from the right click menu! What are they working on then? Still fixing bugs?

[zadjii]

Have you tried enabling QuickEdit mode in the Properties (right click on the titlebar)? Quick edit lets you use the mouse for selecting, and in Insider's releases we've even added support for Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy paste (even in wsl!).

We've been working on not only tons of bugs, but adding plenty of new features, including support for VT sequences, 256/RGB color, improving our unicode support, enhanced accessibility support.

The fact that all of our devs are under 30 is merely coincidence :)

[Scramblejams]

I just started turning Quick Edit off because I understood it was responsible for that strange bug where the console sometimes gets stuck until you press return. :-( Is that one on the to do list?

[tom_]

That’s how selection has always worked. It halts console output until you’re done selecting.

[Scramblejams]

It's overeager, then. It's pausing the console even when no selection is made. Maybe I'm clicking in the window accidentally, but I'm not selecting anything. I certainly don’t have the problem on Linux.

[Longhanks]

Ah, so I'm not the only on with this issue! Thanks for the workaround.

[merinowool]

Why do you need to select quick edit to be able to copy? That makes no sense.

[mastazi]

You don't need to but it makes it easier

[pjmlp]

What about learning to use the OS?

Quick edit for UNIX style copy-paste with the mouse goes all the way back to Windows 9X.

The only issue is that it was always disabled by default, until they changed to be enabled by default with the latest set of changes.

Spending a couple of seconds after logging in to enable it, for the very first time on a new system, was never a big deal.

[blkhawk]

Its not quite UNIX style - it works like a weird frame selection instead of follow the text LtR like any *nix console I can think of. It would be super if that could be fixed as well with an option.

[oblio]

I'm pretty sure it's block/column selection instead of line selection.

Why they made that design decision, we will never know. Maybe a dev was working with a lot of hex output? (even so, he should be slapped retroactively, unless he's Raymond Chen, cause Raymond Chen is amazing so we'll forgive his transgressions)

[tom_]

The console 'screen' is a grid of (character,attribute) pairs, so there are no lines as such...

I'm not sure the box selection is super useful these days, but in the late 80s/early 90s, GUI-style interfaces were very popular, and a box selection makes a certain amount of sense, so you can avoid picking up borders and so on. Would have been nice if they'd got both types in from day 1 though...

[icc97]

This is one of the major changes that happened since this team started working on the console. In Windows 10 it has line selection that flows correctly over line breaks.

[ocdtrekkie]

This is also not true as of Windows 10 build 16299/Fall Creator's Update (what I'm currently using), and may not be true of an earlier release or two. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V both work just fine in cmd. I found evidence it was considered an "experimental feature" available in the Command Prompt's Properties dialogue back in 2015, it looks like it's been folded into the default behavior at this point.

Microsoft's done a lot of work on legacy components of Windows like cmd and notepad in the last few years, assumptions about behavior that has worked the same for the last twenty years may no longer be valid. ;)

[nitinreddy88]

Powershell. All of these shortcomings were fixed in it. Currently its also supported in Windows/*nix

[ygra]

PowerShell is a shell, thus a console application, buy not the console. So it's just the settings of the console window if you observe any differences. The PowerShell shortcut on the start menu may have different settings from the command prompt shortcut.

[Someone1234]

I love Powershell, but it still uses the exact same ConHost as cmd and command.com before it. When scripting PS this is a non-issue, but using it interactively remains painful.

[zadjii]

May I ask what your specific pain points are? We've been doing a lot to try and improve our usability but there's so very much on our backlog that it's hard to prioritize. I'm always curious if people have specific requests

edit: pain points with conhost*. I work on conhost, the "terminal", not PowerShell

[ocdtrekkie]

Not the parent, but personally, my only real pet peeve with PowerShell as an IT admin is that the right click start menu replaced cmd with PowerShell despite it still being drastically slower to load on many PCs. There's a setting to change it back, but if you are working on other computers all the time, that's not useful at all. This is my main peeve with the Settings panel as well: It's slower to get things done with, but the legacy panels have been intentionally made harder to reach[1] before performance parity has been reached.

My understanding is that improving PowerShell's start time is a big part of the next release of Windows 10, and that's great, but once that's done was the right time to put PowerShell as the default console on Windows, not before. 98% of why I open a prompt is to run "ping", and waiting for the prompt to actually show up in PS takes longer than a ping timeout. (Which is to say, if you need one takeaway from this post: Remember that no matter how cool you make PowerShell, most of us are only opening it to ping something, that's the most important experience to get right.)

Especially some of the decisions with the install screens for Windows 10 seem to highlight that people at Microsoft aren't aware how some subtle changes cause significant pain/delay for IT folks. Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.

[1]Example: Programs and Features from the legacy control panel no longer appears in search, even if you type it all the way out. Typing "appwiz.cpl" is the fastest way to see what's installed on a computer (and what versions) at a glance, but kinda a pro trick.

[blkhawk]

> Like with 1803 being forced to come up with security questions when creating the local account on a PC you're about to domain join.

Security Questions are a really bad anti feature that nonetheless is really persistent. I don't need 5 more random alphanumeric Passwords in case I forget that other random alphanumeric password I can barely remember. In most places online where they are used the rip open huge security holes should you actually set reasonable a answer to "Whats my Pet called?".

[ocdtrekkie]

Yeah, and it was introduced for local accounts in Windows 10 just in the last few months. Beyond the general irritation of it being a poor security system, making me do it for a user account that isn't personal to me is additionally quite silly: I told the installer I was going to domain join the PC.

I end up mashing the keyboard for each one to create hopefully suitably random answers that even I myself don't know. But it's still arguably an additional security hole that I have to simply hope Microsoft hasn't somehow stored in plaintext somewhere.

[rosege]

You could change the right click back to cmd by using a group policy to change the registry. E.g. https://blogs.msmvps.com/russel/2016/11/18/defaulting-to-pow...

[ocdtrekkie]

Also true, but there's a limit to how much nonsense you want to dump into GPOs. Most of what you throw in your Group Policy will inevitably end up sticking around for the next decade and a half long past its irrelevance, and regardless of whether you throw everything in one big GPO or have several dozen small GPOs, you will never remember where that stupid setting came from down the road.

So I'm hesitant to go overboard on custom registry entry pushes (as opposed to the standard templates) for things that only affect IT experience.

[lbenes]

Can't speak for OP, but I tried migrating some of our workflow to Windows. First annoyance I hit was this one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30418886/how-and-why-doe...

This may be by design, but there has to be a better way. Unix/Linux consoles have allowed mouse copy/paste for as long as I can remember and I've never experienced this bug over there.

Really annoying when you go out to lunch with a job running, only to come back to find that it's right where you left it. So many solutions to this problem like making the copy/paste mode harder to trigger accidently. Visual feedback that it's in that mode, or allowing the buffer to expand indefinitely when copy mode is triggered.

Pausing the job is the last thing I'd want, especially since this seems to easy to trigger accidentally.

[konstmonst]

Even on Windows I use mingw64 terminal + pacman. My pain points are:

- Conemu can show up on a shorcut, Windows Console can't - Windows Console doesn't have tabs - There is no CTRL + R to search for the last command

Ok maybe I've got more bash issues: - autocompletion in cmd doesn't work, not for commands nor for command arguments, like in Linux consoles - mc doesn't work in cmd

- I really hate dos batch language because it is not logical imho (I don't want to start to rant about it here). On the other hand I remember the bash language better and can write small one liners to create commands that don't natively exist. PowerShell is not an alternative because it treats everything as text and inserts new lines, where bash does not.

[ygra]

> There is no CTRL + R to search for the last command

On Unix this is typically a shell feature, not a console/terminal feature. The corresponding way to do this in the Windows console would be F8, I think.

> autocompletion in cmd doesn't work

> I really hate dos batch language

None of those have anything to do with the console.

[ilovetux]

Wow! This blew my mind. I have grown very used to using cmd, but have not thought of using the F keys before (do not know why). Behavior seemed strange at first, but after a quick DDG search found this StackOverflow question [0] and that led to this documentation [1]. This is a huge area of functionality which I don't think most people know about.

I will be using F7 a lot in the future.

As an aside, maintaining backwards compatibility (this is DOS era stuff) is why IMO it would be very hard to update core windows utilities, but maintaining backwards compatibility (and similar decisions) is why IMO Windows is as popular as it is.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1641948/f-n-shortcuts-in...

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...

[erikbye]

C-r is a feature of the PSReadLine module for PowerShell.

[sun41]

Almost any console is better than the Windows console. I use iTerm2 on OSX now, what an awesome UX. Maybe it's a good idea that you guys first take a look at what you are actually trying to reinvent.