widecharwidth VS Windows Terminal

>For example, iTerm2 considers the "rosette" emoji to have width 1

The reason for this is quite possibly that Unicode 9 changed the width for some codepoints (mostly emoji) from 1 to 2, and iTerm until very recently (don't know if it's released yet) defaulted to the Unicode 8 widths, with an opt-in escape sequence to change to Unicode 9.

>This approach comes from the wcwidth utility, and the comment at the top of the C source file provides further insight into the difficulties faced here.

That's link goes to Markus Kuhn's implementation from 2007. It supports Unicode 5, and is by now woefully out of date. You don't want to use it anymore.

Most terminals have their own definition, and the annoying part is that the client application and the terminal need to have theirs in sync or they get weird glitches when moving the cursor.

Shameless plug: Fish's solution is widecharwidth[0], which is a python script that parses the Unicode data files and generates a wcwidth for C++, Javascript and Rust. It's still a wcwidth, meaning that it has issues with joining code points, but it's at least a start. It's up-to-date with Unicode 14 and, unless they change the data format (again) should be easy to update to future Unicode releases.

It's public domain and used by at least fish and WezTerm.

[0]: https://github.com/ridiculousfish/widecharwidth

With fish we've made the experience that relying on libc isn't good enough.

Specifically in the case of connecting to a server that typically has an old libc with old unicode information, from a desktop that has a much newer system, or in case of ambiguous characters, where libc will just give you one width that might not match what the terminal actually renders (and they frequently have configuration options to change it!).

So we've made something we call widecharwidth (https://github.com/ridiculousfish/widecharwidth), which is a python script that parses the unicode datafiles (UnicodeData.txt, emoji-data.txt and friends) and generates a header you can #include.

And someone's opened a PR to mosh to integrate it: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1143

> 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

Assume its related to this:

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

It's nothing serious just microsoft engineers writing slow as shit code and reacting poorly to someone trying to help.

"There are plenty of offline scenarios where this would be incredibly useful. For disconnected environments, etc. There are some environments that will never connect to winget."

Source: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440#disc...