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by easton 1712 days ago
Not that your IT department will be letting you update today, but something to look forward to is that Teams in Windows 11 uses the shared Edge WebView runtime (replacing Electron), which means it takes around 50% of the RAM it did in Windows 10.

Also, WSL graphics support (which isn't coming to Windows 10 for some reason), winget has been moved to stable (that is coming to Windows 10), and Windows Terminal is included in the box (but doesn't replace the cmd.exe or powershell.exe terminal emulator for some reason).

4 comments

Neither cmd.exe nor powershell.exe are terminal emulators, rather they are both shells / scripting languages. The legacy looking crappy terminal window is usually conhost.exe.

Windows has a console interface unlike that found on Unix, using APIs rather than escape sequences to interface with the console. Also, its console implementation was historically coupled tightly with the conhost.exe application, which historically is both the terminal emulator and console endpoint simultaneously.

The blog series centered around https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l... is the best resource I've found online that discusses Windows' legacy console support as well as some vision of how this subsystem has changed in the years since.

These changes improved OS interop, but also de-couple the legacy crap so that third party terminal emulators can be better supported on Windows generally (separating the console endpoint from the terminal display), allowing for the creation of `CreatePseudoConsole()`.

Prior to this, third party terminal emulators that wanted to support Windows apps had to run the legacy conhost.exe and shove the window way off the desktop (to hide), and then scrape the window for its contents. This is/was required so that the app has a console backed by a conhost.exe process (responding to the console apis). `CreatePseudoConsole()` fixes a lot of that mess.

My anecdotal experience is that Teams' performance still sucks. Terminal is pretty cool tho.
Ahhh, yeah; keen on the new term. The WSL window support looks great too. I develop in Linux VMs, but my host is Windows 10 pro. Been sticking with vbox this far.
Agreed, Terminal is pretty nice for casual use.
Only Windows would ship three different terminal emulators in the default install...
How many are in a default Ubuntu install? At least 2.
And none of them are legacy cruft with ass-backwards copying and pasting. The cmd.exe "terminal" needs to die.
It can't because "COMPATIBILITY"