bundle Julia with a better terminal on Windows?

[StefanKarpinski]

This seems like the nicest console emulator around on Windows:

http://bliker.github.io/cmder/
http://cmder.net
https://mintty.github.io

I think it would make sense, since Windows is not really a DIY platform, but more of a download-and-use-the-thing-that-you-can-click-on platform, that we include a really nice console emulator for people to use.

EDIT: fixed link
EDIT (@ViralBShah): mintty as the preferred choice

[lindahua]

+1

[tkelman]

That looks like a custom configuration wrapping up conemu, clink, and (optionally) msysgit. Clink is mostly readline, which we don't need any more. mintty might be an easier/smaller alternative to conemu.

[StefanKarpinski]

Yes, I think that's the deal. Since I don't use Windows myself, I'm somewhat uninformed about these tools, but I'd be more interested in making sure the experience is as nice as possible than minimizing the dependency size. Mintty just doesn't seem to look or feel as nice as cmder.

[tkelman]

I'm quite happy with mintty as used by Cygwin and MSYS2 (though there's still a bug making Julia not very usable inside mintty, I should check whether that's true in conemu), I don't see too much need for console tabs. There's some discussion of these and other alternatives in #6795

Any bugs that happen with whatever we choose would be harder to properly report or fix if we go with something that is a fork-of-fork-of-fork (or wrapper of wrapper of wrapper). Babun is another similar one of these projects that looks shiny, but is really just a custom configured version of Cygwin.

[quinnj]

Here's a crazy mastermind plan. Let's build a repl and/or IJulia notebook frontend for LightTable and ship with that!
But seriously, the more I've been poking around with LightTable, the more I can envision a proper "Julia IDE" being all baked in to a nice Julia plugin. It has all the extensibility to allow something like RStudio or MatLab IDE, but even better because you can do inline plots, or something notebook-ish where the program execution is "graph-based" instead of repl line-by-line. I think Mike's GSoC is a great start in getting the fundamentals in place, but there's a ton of potential there.

Anyway, I digress. I think mintty wounds like a good option here.

[tkelman]

I went through and tried a few of these options. cmder indeed looks decent.

With Console2 I was able to manually set it up to boot Julia (adding a Julia "tab" under the Settings - there's an xml config file so this could be automated) then running it as Console.exe -t Julia. Console2 didn't fix unicode display issues though. The default text select behavior is pretty awful, you hold left shift then click and drag. Holding a key to select can be omg-carpal-tunnel uncomfortable on a laptop.

I couldn't get cmder to start up Julia directly, but starting it manually worked okay, and displayed simple unicode properly. Cmder depends on the MSVC runtime dll's, was there a license concern in the particular terms under which you can redistribute those? The default selection behavior here was also left-shift (or right-clicking the icon, going to edit and switching to mark mode, same as in the default Windows console), but I found how to change it to not require simultaneous key+mouse.

ConEmu has some really annoying default behaviors, wanting to save its configuration in the registry by default, popping up a confirmation dialog every time I close it, etc. Was easy to start it directly in Julia, and simple unicode worked.

Mintty will take a little bit of work, but be the lightest and easiest option for users in the end. Some of the current issues with mintty are related to bigger libuv problems that will hopefully get fixed together. There's some code somewhere that tests specifically for Cygwin and MSYS2 named pipes, which I think would need to be checked and modified to work with the standalone download of mintty. We could maybe use MSYS2's version of mintty, but then we'd need msys-2.0.dll which is about 4x bigger than the msys-1.0.dll that we currently include as part of msysgit.

None of these options look to compile particularly easily with MinGW, and I wouldn't want to try cross-compiling. But just downloading the release binary should be good enough for these.

[StefanKarpinski]

@ihnorton, over here you said:

+1 for mintty for now. Based on my own experiences, I would be strongly opposed to packaging conemu.

can you elaborate on why over here?

[ihnorton]

@StefanKarpinski basically because every time I have tried it, too many things are just off. I don't remember all of the issues, but very clearly remember the worst one: it does bad things with subprocesses and makes spawning vastly slower than it already is on Windows.

noop.bat: @echo off

 julia> @time for i in 1:1000
       open(`noop.bat`,"r")
       end

time in seconds, two trials each:

    default console: 1.30,1.31
    cmder: 53.0, 61.6 (actually restarted twice more and got similar times)

In fact, my mouse starts freezing when running this test code under cmder - but there is no such problem under default Julia console.

[ihnorton]

See here for part of the reason why: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuHk
and from the FAQ:

Q. mingw/bash/git works slow in ConEmu.
A. In rare cases on some configurations users may notice lags while executing commands in ConEmu tab. This may be when many child processes are created while command execution. I you are so unlucky - just uncheck "Inject ConEmuHk" on Features page. I'm still looking for the cause of the problem.

This "feature" can be disabled, but bad spawn performance has been a known issue for several years. It is concerning that such a broken feature is enabled by default (and as I said, this is only the worst issue).

@tkelman:

Cmder depends on the MSVC runtime dll's, was there a license concern in the particular terms under which you can redistribute those?

Right, they can't be redistributed with GPL software. Now, technically, we wouldn't be linking it from Julia. I don't know if that changes anything.

[jhasse]

+1 for mintty. I'm using MSYS2 + Julia anyway and it works fine :)

[tkelman]

Using mintty from MSYS2 essentially works now, as long as you also include stty.exe, msys-2.0.dll, msys-intl-8.dll, and msys-iconv-2.dll. And you need to explicitly set HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% before starting, otherwise mintty tries to set HOME to wherever it's located.

I also tried with MSYS1's version of mintty since we already have msys-1.0.dll with msysgit, but that didn't quite work. It seems in MSYS1 mintty, uv_pipe_getsockname(pipe, NULL, &len) in jl_uv.c returns 0.

[ihnorton]

mintty seems like the least-bad option. Just beware that support for shelling out to things using the Windows console API may be spotty. Pick your poison I guess, but this seems ok to me, in exchange for better "everything else".

(Have you tried something like git diff - does the pager work?)

[tkelman]

No, does not look like the pager works, but that might just be because we're using a version of less from msysgit, which doesn't work with mintty properly. Inside a full MSYS2 or Cygwin installation, less works fine from Julia (calling that environment's version of less). Tried just copying over MSYS2 less, and the dll's it depends on (ncurses and, hah, pcre), but that seemed to stack dump for some reason...

[pao]

@tkelman I believe I've had success with the version of less from gnuwin32, though it's not at all up to date.