back to article Twice in one month: Microsoft updates new-style Terminal preview

You can now get a Windows Terminal preview without the roam-tastic settings after 0.4 appeared in the Microsoft Store in Windows 10, replacing version 0.3 which it kicked out just a few weeks ago. Windows Terminal is an official open source alternative to the familiar Windows utility. The team is careful to avoid stating that …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "One issue was that the Terminal would crash when set to a font that is not installed, after copying that setting from another machine."

    So instead of fix a bug, which would also affect none roaming (uninstall the font), they remove a feature. So based on it crashing if a font isn't present, they should disable the ability to save the terminal settings on any computer, as it can crash it if the font is removed from the computer.

    1. keithzg
      FAIL

      Classic modern development pattern

      A feature is surfacing an issue? Don't fix the underlying issue, remove the feature!

  2. karlkarl Silver badge

    Or if you think the Windows store is a crock of DRM shite and don't want to encourage its use; you can grab the latest binaries from:

    https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases

    You can then install the msixbundle using Add-AppxPackage offline and on as many PCs as you need.

  3. Primus Secundus Tertius

    HTML to other formats

    If your aim is to change the format rather than just cut and paste, I recommend a program called Pandoc. This will convert a wide domain of input formats into an extensive range of outputs. It was written by an American academic and since extended by others; and is available in Windows and Linux versions.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dyspepsia

    I read a list of 'features' and 'improvements' from Microsoft and feel queasy again. Bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it's that acid redux disease I keep hearing about?

    1. Teiwaz

      Re: Dyspepsia

      "DysPEPSIa : The choice of the current generation"

      Sorry, i couldn't resist - I used to get it a lot during puberty - especially if I drank anything fizzy.

  5. stiine Silver badge
    Facepalm

    seriously?

    If I'm cutting and pasting, I want only the text, I don't want fonts, formatting, embedded video, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter Andromeda, etc.

    Maybe this is how Microsofties write html, by copying and pasting from stackoverflow...

  6. streaky
    Linux

    Well..

    I've switched to Linux on the desktop since I first got hyped about this, but still... Microsoft are finally getting around to fixing one the things I've been complaining about since the late-90's - even to the face of senior Microsoft execs in a pub in London one night circa-2010 - so it can't be all bad. Wonder if it'll make it into the next OS release they do...

  7. Tascam Holiday
    Linux

    Bless 'em

    This is a nice little development, but MS seems inordinately proud of their achievements in this simple application, with features that ahem, other OSes have had for years and years. I had to laugh at the overblown promo video for this that came out a few months ago.

    1. Alan Bourke

      Re: Bless 'em

      There hasn't been a decent update from Microsoft but there are plenty of other alternatives like Cmder and especially Hyper.js

    2. billdehaan

      Re: Bless 'em

      I went to a Microsoft DevDays conference back in the early 2000s when .Net was just starting up. Our company wanted both an insider and outsider views, so they sent two of us. I was the Unix guy, the other guy on the team was the Windows guy.

      I would say at least of half of what was presented was GUI wrappers for standard Unix functionality that had existed for decades. After one presentation, where my Windows compadre had written about three pages of notes on Microsoft's exciting new interoperability product, he noticed that my Unix-centric notes were somewhat terse. I'd written "Microsoft just invented UUCP". That was pretty much the tone of the the conference.

      One of the biggest things that MS was pushing was Intellisense, and their adaptive spell checking technology that was going to really make MS Word super powerful. The example they gave was how Word automatically changed teh to the without any user interaction. My Windows colleague said, "I doubt Unix has anything like that, at which point I reminded him whenever he asked why I continued to use my "ancient" emacs editor, one of the reasons was "abbrev mode"...

      Don't get me wrong, I think it's great MS includes these improvements. They're welcome. But I just don't see them as being all that brilliant.

      I don't see anything in this new terminal that's not already in the freeware Cmder, which itself takes the console from ConEmu project, so I'm not getting excited about it. On the other hand, making it standard will mean it's available on all machines, and I won't have to carry a portable copy of Cmder around everywhere I go, so that's welcome.

  8. jake Silver badge

    Uh ...

    "Version 0.4 has several new features. One of the most obvious is HTML copy, which is now "incontrovertible,""

    That's not a feature, that's a bug. HTML copy should be a right-click option, the default (and keybr0ad shortcut) must be plain text or the entire thing is bloody useless to most of us.

  9. Adrian 4

    Is 'incontrovertible' the new word for 'That's how it is, like it or lump it' ?

  10. pstiles

    You can even add GIT BASH into it

    'peasy!

    Tried doing it myself, but ended up just going to stackoverflow to see who'd done it before :}

  11. GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

    It's,... almost useful,....

    ... and would be moreso if there was a Powershell ISE option, the ability to 'Run As', and also change colour preferences by accessing settings by right clicking on the tab. Ubuntu terminal is fun for shit's 'n giggles, not sure what I'd use it for as I already run a Ubuntu VM,.. but hey, I can ponder that.

  12. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Incontrovertible?

    Out of my area, but I have a nagging sense that the feature should be called something like "interconvertible". Copy and paste between diverse windows. Am I just ill informed?

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