There's even more under the "Updates archive" expando in that post.
It was a pretty compelling prototype. But after I played with Polyglot Notebooks[1], I pretty much just abandoned that experiment. There's a _lot_ of UI that needs to be written to build a notebook-like experience. But the Polyglot notebooks took care of that by just converting the commandline backend to a jupyter kernel.
I've been writing more and more script-like experiments in those ever since. Just seems so much more natural to have a big-ol doc full of notes, that just so happens to also have play buttons to Do The Thing.
I hadn’t seen these yet but have been low-key looking for this for a while. I think something like a polyglot notebook might be a better “system” for a person or an LLM to manipulate to achieve something…
Actually a really neat concept with building that into windows terminal. I remember seeing this a while ago. Personally I love the notebook style interactive documents and hope there are more going forward.
Notably this article was written based on Windows Terminal 1.18. That was before WT 1.22, which included this PR: [^1] which roughly doubled the terminal's throughput. That combined with a couple of other PRs in 1.22 made some scenarios up to _16x_ faster[^2]
It's shipped with Windows since Windows 11. Updates come via the Store (since that's a lot faster than OS updates), but it's definitely preinstalled these days
No love for Windows Terminal? I know that linux has a much richer terminal ecosystem, but WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now. Could anyone have imagined that 10 years ago?
It's what I most miss from using windows. It handles tabs, theming and renaming of windows so well. Being able to tell at a glance what each window is connected to, it's purpose etc is very handy for me.
What complaints do you have with the Windows Terminal specifically? I can get having issues with CMD or PowerShell - they're very non-unix-y. But WT itself is probably one of the most feature-complete terminal emulators out there these days. I'd love to know what you think it's missing
The thing that specifically makes me sigh every single day is that I start a power shell, the terminal opens and it displays most of the greeting, but only later, maybe in a few seconds, or when I click it, the rest displays. Arguably that might be a power shell bug but it's annoying and the same people made both. It's a bad smell, did anybody QA this?
Some time during my day I'll forget that because Microsoft's engineers have apparently seen a real Unix but have little or no experience living with one they've decided PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD are the same thing. This is another one of those things like doing MAC and encryption in the wrong order, or not realising you need a new variable (with the same name) for each iteration of your loops, where it makes sense if it's 1975 and this isn't yet common knowledge, but this is 2025, fucking ask someone.
There are more annoyances, but those are the biggest two.
Yedit actually was written by a Microsoft employee :P
It had some problems however with handling unicode (iirc). Basically, shipping yedit would have required a huge re-write of its underlying text buffer. In the end the discussions we had with Malcom concluded that just writing a new one was probably easier and more maintainable in the long run.
Thanks for adding much-needed cool things to Windows lately — the Terminal and PowerToys and now this, all super appreciated. Do you see command palette evolving and becoming a core part of Windows itself in the future? :)
That is _technically_ correct (the best kind). There's some plumbing between conhost and Terminal we need to clean up before we can add it to Terminal too. We've got a branch ready, we've just got to merge a whole stack of PRs first before we can get there.
There's even more under the "Updates archive" expando in that post.
It was a pretty compelling prototype. But after I played with Polyglot Notebooks[1], I pretty much just abandoned that experiment. There's a _lot_ of UI that needs to be written to build a notebook-like experience. But the Polyglot notebooks took care of that by just converting the commandline backend to a jupyter kernel.
I've been writing more and more script-like experiments in those ever since. Just seems so much more natural to have a big-ol doc full of notes, that just so happens to also have play buttons to Do The Thing.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...