wayfire VS Windows Terminal

Unusable until moving your mouse to the edges of the screen and clicking makes it hit the scrollbar, or the exit button. Right now it initiates a resize.

Illustrated example from a different compositor https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/issues/570

It's the only DE I'm excited about it so I hope they fix that. Very very promising and the best part is that it made the GNOME people mad.

GNOME: "Sorry I don't see the use case for that, PR closed. Make your own project. "

One of the developers just responded on the github issue referecing this thread.

"After a bit of discussion on HackerNews, I got a bit better understanding of the actual problem. People don't want to just configure the keys according to a particular layout - the actual 'issue' here is that they expect the key binding changes together with the layout. Unfortunately, the 0.8.0 changes didn't make this possible to implement as a plugin.

I would reconsider adding this as an option if there are enough interested people. React with a thumbs up to this comment if you are interested in having this option (though the defaults will certainly remain as they are now). Please, react only if you actually use Wayfire or would use it if it had this feature :)"

https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/issues/1601#issuecommen...

I have been on Wayfire for over a year now, and I can't possibly praise it enough. It's entirely modular, so you can make it look and behave exactly as you want. It does tiling, it does Compiz-style wobbly windows and 3D desktop cubes, configurable rules and hotkeys, everything. It's stable and handles gaming flawlessly.

Your impression of Wayland is going to be very much determined by the quality of the compositor implementing it, and I've found Wayfire to be the best, by far - but oddly, also the one least talked about. Everybody's paying attention to stuff like Hyprland, Sway and Mutter - you're barking up the wrong tree there. Wayfire is fantastic, has most of the bells and whistles Compiz on X11 has, and is as pretty or as functional as you want it to be.

- VR support

I thought so too not long ago, but Wayland compositors needed some time to mature, and some of them are getting pretty damn good. Ever since I discovered Wayfire I'm a total believer, it's better than any X window management solution I've used. Much lighter too.

might be a small window when wayfire releases a version, before master identfies as the next release number. (see: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/blob/master/meson.build )

A quick off-the-cuff remark based solely on the title: in 2024, I think the state of the terminal has never been better, in large part to Microsoft making a high quality terminal easily available to everyone on Windows [1]

As an application author, I love being able to assume that all major platforms have a good terminal and that my favorite terminal rendering libraries should Just Work on all of them

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440

> convince management of the value

This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point.

Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

"Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version."

More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server.

They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo.

I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

GitHub

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400