The Windows console
So Windows (XP and 2k and any reasonable version, anyway) has cmd.exe. cmd.exe mostly does the trick: you can do basic shell-like stuff like use pipes, you can select, copy, and paste text, you can change the font, change buffer length, and search through your command history for a previous command (try F8).
But pretty much every feature I’ve mentioned above is sub-par; some of them are worse than others. For example:
- You can’t resize the terminal horizontally by dragging the border of the window — you need to set terminal width in the options, then the terminal width is a fixed size and the window size can be changed around it (you end up with a horizontal scroll bar).
- The command interpreter is pretty basic compared to an alternative like
bash. - Copy and paste is crap. It is annoying to select stuff in the window – for some reason the only selection model is with a rectangle, which is not inline with any other application on the planet. I don’t believe there is any keyboard shortcut to paste.
- The fonts you can use are very limited.
- While there is F8 to search the command history, basic editing of the command-line is nowhere near as powerful as readline-based applications (like you are used to on Linux).
I guess there are actually 2 parts to the problem: the window which does the display, and the console application which runs the actual command interpreter. I’m a little unsure how this is actually broken down in Windows, in Linux it might be xterm+bash.
There are quite a few replacements around:
- terminator
- Console version 2 beta
- Poderosa
- Cygwin + rxvt
But none of them quite do what one might want. A simple replacement that doesn’t change things too much, just makes general cmd.exe use nicer is required. So selection needs to be fixed, window resizing could be helped, and with an option for readline-supported command-line editing.
Is that too much to ask?