I've used iTerm and Terminal on Mac, and the default Windows Terminal (conhost), PuTTY sand MinTTY on Windows.

Terminal.app is much, much better than conhost, even after the Windows 10 update. It's fast, supports a ton of thoughtful features (such as customizable title bars via extended ANSI codes, real line wrapping during resize, good Unicode support from the very beginning, etc.). With Terminal.app I can be quite happy and productive even with someone else's Mac or with the default settings. I've used iTerm2 but their features weren't compelling enough for me, and the iTerm font rendering is noticeably worse in many ways. Apple has also been very good about giving Terminal.app continuous updates.

On Windows though I have almost always had to install MinTTY or something just to get a halfway usable terminal emulator. The default emulator is just so limited - Unicode support is very plug and pray, the title bar is totally locked, and having to use Windows APIs to change text formatting is a pain. Conhost is also amazingly slow when it comes to large amounts of text, so much so that printf can be extremely detrimental to program performance just because it has to wait for the terminal window to catch up.

PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions. That means that in practice I often pop open cmd.exe even if PS is a better choice, just because I don't want to sit through a long load time.

Microsoft really should get their Terminal story in order. I'll definitely try out ConEmu the next time I sit in front of a Windows box, but like you I wish MS would improve their own apps!

> good Unicode support from the very beginning

I once started a Chinese character flash card program in Python on Windows.

The yak shaving was unbelievable. I never got a working version, but I learned a lot about code pages, and why "building a console from scratch" is not actually the right answer to "I want to be able to test a toy program I'm making before it's finished."

Tkinter would have given you a basic Unicode capable GUI without the hassles of the console.

Hmm, going back through my old .py files, I ultimately did start using Tkinter... and for some reason thought yaml was really important...

Still, would have been nice to have a program that essentially took in and put out text without learning everything about GUI elements.

I'd never written anything with a GUI before, and "I'd like to see unicode" is a really weird place to dive in.

> PowerShell's terminal experience is better but not quite there. And, PS suffers from extremely long load times - I've seen it take upwards of 10 seconds to start without any extensions.

Small price to pay to be able to pipe objects, man!

Sorry about that - we lost control of our startup times in PS V3 and have been working to get it back under control. PowerShell V5 had substantial improvements but we keep working on it and V5.1 is even faster. Give it a try - I think you'll like it.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

I really hope so!

I basically stopped using ps ( for smaller stuff) because the startup tone is so awful.

I'm not entirely sure if you're joking or not (one of the hazards of the textual communication medium). Yes, piping objects is fun and occasionally very useful, but waiting ten seconds to pop a terminal so I can run `ipconfig` or something is not so useful.

Are you actually able to not be confused by piping objects? In Unix everything is a string so I just pipe text to sort and then unique...etc. PS always complains relentlessly. The GUI features and .NET integration is nice though.

What drove me away from Terminal.app was the fact that I can't use command-1/2/3 to switch tabs. Ctrl-tab doesn't work either.

Did I miss something?

CMD + { and CMD + }

Thanks but... yuck. Any way I can remap these?

Cmd-<number> is a pretty standard way to jump to tabs (and arguably, Ctrl-tab as well).

⌃⇥ actually does work in Terminal.app. And in fact, ⌃⇥ and ⌃⇧⇥ are the official keyboard shortcuts in the menu, with ⌘{ and ⌘} being undocumented aliases. This is also how Safari works too.

I wonder why they chose ⌘{ and ⌘} instead of ⌘[ and ⌘]. With the later you don't need to hold down SHIFT (at least on US keyboard layout.)

Because it's the same keyboard shortcuts that Safari uses, and in Safari ⌘[ and ⌘] navigate the history stack.

Whilst I am glad to hear about ConEmu; I have to disagree, I use windows cmd.exe very regularly, and know lots of other people that do, and I have never used ConEmu before! I might give it a try now I know about it.

Cmder is a good configuration bundle for ConEmu and a better place for new users to start.

Cmder seems cool but it's ConEmu + Clink + git for windows.

- Clink is for cmd what PSReadline is for posh.

- posh-git does what git for windows does (I personally don't like git info in my prompt, so use neither, and have a custom, Unixy-one)

ConEmu si really nice simply because you can have tabs, split pane and good color schemes. 've never gotten to the level that some people need, so ConEmu + bash = everything I was using on OSX.

I highly recommend ConEmu, I've used it for awhile.

con emu makes the linix subsystem shell a lot nicer too, in fact has an inbuilt ubuntu theme that makes most colors sane

I use Windows since version 3.1 and never bothered with it.

Properly configuring cmd.exe was enough for me. Then again I only use the terminal on "as required" basis.

It has never been stable for me, so I stick with the console, even though I would like to switch to something better.