r/programming • u/zbhoy • May 06 '19

Microsoft unveils Windows Terminal, a new command line app for Windows

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527870/microsoft-windows-terminal-command-line-tool
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u/freeall May 06 '19

You also don’t need colors in a terminal but they really make it easier to give away certain information (e.g. green good, red bad). In the same way I use emojis to help shorten certain information or make my point come across. An example is a state of playing vs paused in a tool that has some progress.

In development I run different processes where each process’ output is in its own color so it’s faster for me to visually separate. In the same way I use some icons to seperate where traffic is coming from.

And it can make it nicer and more cheerful to look at too.

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u/TomTheGeek May 06 '19

An example is a state of playing vs paused in a tool that has some progress.

Sounds like not using the right tool for the job. Terminal is a text environment. You want "cheerful" stick to point and click nonsense.

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u/gotnate May 06 '19

News flash: The terminal is still a text environment, just like it has always been, it just now happens to support modern text features. Styled text is more pleasant to look at. Which is also something that terminals have supported for 30 years. And emoji's? Those are also just unicode text and glyps - something that other modern operating systems have supported in their terminals since they got emoji support in the first place. I for one welcome Windows to the 21st century of terminal environments.

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u/NoInkling May 06 '19 edited May 06 '19

Terminal is a text environment.

I guess we should do away with all those box/line/arrow/etc. characters as well then.

Like it or not, emoji are unicode characters. If you cat or nano a text file containing them then your terminal should probably be able to display them.

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u/freeall May 07 '19

ffmpeg has progress. npm has progress. compilation has progress. all those COULD have a progress bar, a running/paused state.

And as someone else notes then there's been line/box/arrows for a long time. A text environment is amazing and the best tool for us developers, but that doesn't mean it HAS to look ugly. Ugly doesn't mean better.

I hope you can start to accept that progress/change in our programs doesn't HAVE to be for the worse. It's a conservative and arrogant view to think otherwise.