Hold up, what's your beef with Windows Terminal? I've really been enjoying it!

Same. I am not a Windows person and never have been, but Windows Terminal is clearly lovingly maintained and already much, much better than previous terminal emulator offerings for Windows. I don't particularly wish I had it on Linux, but it's already my go-to when I have to use Windows for a bit, and I think it's an impressive piece of software.

cmder [0] is great. When I was forced to use Windows, a good terminal emulator was the first thing I looked for. The trouble is most Windows users don't know what a terminal emulator is or that anything better is possible. But it has been possible for a long time.

[0] https://cmder.net/

Cmder used to be my go-to for the times I had to use Windows before my most recent attempts which came after WSL, PowerShell Core, Windows Terminal, and the whole new ecosystem Microsoft seems to be invested in building around the command line. I don't remember any specific complaints about it except that configuration (if you wanted to customize it— defaults were quite good) options were kinda overwhelming. At the same time, I don't have any interest in going back to it after using Windows Terminal for a while.

I'd be curious about your first impressions of Windows Terminal as a more recent cmder user, if you still have a Windows VM lying around.

My judgement of Windows Terminal might have been unfair, but it has its annoyances.

- Sometimes the preferences just decide to go through the "open as a json file" path

- I don't know if it's my settings or what, but in WSL2/Ubuntu 20.04 I keep getting into a state where my background is black but lines fill in white. I've used the same .bashrc for a decade without that issue.

- The copy/paste UI is different both from normal Linux interfaces, from CMD, and from the Windows standard.

- As far as I can see, no support for USB CDC devices either via WSL2 or through Windows itself. There's no reason I should need PuTTY still to access a usb-serial console.

Fair criticisms!

Personally I'm thrilled to finally have a good terminal experience on Windows. The copy/paste behavior is very comfortable to me, given the similarity to gnome-terminal. And to be honest I never really got comfortable with CMD's behavior.

I don't use WSL itself much, so I can't comment on those bugs except to say I hope you find fixes.

I've ended up doing a lot of PowerShell for work lately, so I jotted down a guide for myself for getting the terminal to behave the way I like, if it's useful to anyone: https://gist.github.com/sandyarmstrong/8b48d7dd0cb01c63cabc6...

Windows Terminal has a very noticeable lag when typing. To me that makes it completely unusable. I'm using this other default WSL shell app -- I don't actually know what it's called, just says "Ubuntu" for Ubuntu WSL installation.

Instantaneous for me. But I'm already looking forward to running kitty anyhow.

Agreed! It's the only terminal I can find that both respects my color settings and runs tmux well.

>...Windows Terminal...

One of these things is most certainly not like the other. I'm not saying your experience is wrong, just that the general opinion of Windows Terminal is quite positive and can't really be lumped in with the likes of Teams and Outlook.

Yeah, I might not be being fair about Windows terminal. I get into my issues with it above, but I was also a very happy Cygwin/MinTTY user so my standards might be warped.

I didn't realise quite how much I hated Cygwin default fonts until I installed Windows Terminal.

I believe Microsoft is expected to replace Outlook with a web app-based version in the next major release. Google Chrome is the new Microsoft development platform, it seems.

This would allow them to run Outlook natively in EdgeOS, their fork of ChromeOS, in which the default search engine, Bingle, is a proxy to Google Search with nice backgrounds.

(all of this comment completely fictional).

I sure hope they improve the searching, conversation merging (realistically non-merging) and RSS support, but something tells me they won't.

I'm not aware of any "performance/UI catastrophe" of any of the apps listed above, any context? Sure, Outlook and Teams have less than ideal UX, but the "rest of Office" is pretty good imo.