[dev] [st] windows port?

From: Max DeLiso <maxdeliso_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:59:46 -0400

I know what you're probably thinking.

A) That's stupid
B) Therefore OP must be stupid.

But wait for just one second!

The state of the command prompt on windows is a mess. There are several
massive, tangled, bug-ridden, and crufty subsystems which must interact in
multiple ways in order to make it run. (conhost.exe, cmd.exe, and csrss.exe
except that last is increasingly less involved as the years pass). Of
course there is very little customization available and a general dearth of
features.

Console2 has oft been touted as a worthy replacement - and it is, but I
believe that its reliance on windows-isms on a source level makes it
inaccessible to many prospective developers. Also, it depends on boost,
which is an amazing library, but which I think is overkill for this kind of
endeavor. Finally, it's not being maintained any longer as far as I can
see. I have been studying Console2 though to try and glean some windows
best practices which msdn doesn't go into detail on, and it's been useful
in this regard.

Powershell is nice, but it adds many extremely powerful but ultimately
difficult to apply features and has very little compatibility with
anything. (And is not open source).

My aim is to create a minimalist terminal emulator for windows. I want a
project whose relationship to the cmd/conhost/csrss triad is analogous to
the relationship between st and xterm/x. I'm going to try and lift out of
st all of the platform agnostic bits which I am able to, and generally use
it as a reference for terminal emulation routines.

I was wondering if you fine folks could give me some guidance, or perhaps
review my code (it's c++ though). Here's the repo:
https://github.com/maxdeliso/wvt. Thoughts/opinions/personal attacks
welcome!

Thanks,
--max
Received on Thu Apr 11 2013 - 16:59:46 CEST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Thu Apr 11 2013 - 17:12:05 CEST