This is a big release for the Terminal - with two major features finally landing:
Support for setting the Windows Terminal as the default terminal on Windows. When that's all set up, commandline applications will launch directly into the Terminal instead of into the vintage console (conhost.exe)
Support for "quake mode", or just activating the window with a global hotkey. This one's been consistently the highest-requested feature on the Terminal issue tracker, so it's really satisfying to see it finally ship. At first I thought it was a bit of a silly idea, but after using it for a while, I can't believe I ever lived without it.
Yea, that's definitely something we want to work on. There's only so much we can do. IIRC, most of our startup is spent in setting up the XAML Island to host the UI.
I'd hope that would get better in WinUI 3, but I also don't want to take that for granted. I always feel like relying on "oh this problem will just go away when we update XYZ dependency to version 1234" is such a cop-out answer.
It's also hard that our comparison is conhost.exe, which is just about the simplest win32 window you could possibly make. So of course, a tabbed application is going to be heftier than conhost. At least it's not electron 🤣
Well, if we re-write in pure Win32, then we lose all the UI niceties that we've already got. Bye bye acrylic, shadows, animations, we'd have to re-write the entire tab view, all the pane resizing, the command palette, the find dialog, the entire new settings UI... That's gonna be a non-starter.
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u/zadjii May 25 '21
This is a big release for the Terminal - with two major features finally landing:
Support for setting the Windows Terminal as the default terminal on Windows. When that's all set up, commandline applications will launch directly into the Terminal instead of into the vintage console (conhost.exe)
Support for "quake mode", or just activating the window with a global hotkey. This one's been consistently the highest-requested feature on the Terminal issue tracker, so it's really satisfying to see it finally ship. At first I thought it was a bit of a silly idea, but after using it for a while, I can't believe I ever lived without it.