Windows Pseudo Console support

Windows Pseudo Console support

[Óscar Fuentes]

A few years ago Microsoft introduced the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY)
which tries to be the equivalent of *nix ptys.

Has anyone looked into supporting that feature?

Re: Windows Pseudo Console support

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:30:12 +0200
> 
> A few years ago Microsoft introduced the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY)
> which tries to be the equivalent of *nix ptys.
> 
> Has anyone looked into supporting that feature?

Yes, I did.  The way this is implemented has a glaring omission, which
makes it all but useless for Emacs: you cannot in practice control the
encoding of the text that flows through ConPTY.  See

  https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/9174

Too bad.

Re: Windows Pseudo Console support

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
>> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:30:12 +0200
>> 
>> A few years ago Microsoft introduced the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY)
>> which tries to be the equivalent of *nix ptys.
>> 
>> Has anyone looked into supporting that feature?
>
> Yes, I did.  The way this is implemented has a glaring omission, which
> makes it all but useless for Emacs: you cannot in practice control the
> encoding of the text that flows through ConPTY.  See
>
>   https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/9174
>
> Too bad.

Oh, now I remember that you filled that issue because I told you that
the MS Terminal team was very responsive.

Too bad indeed. Maintainers are rejecting patches saying "Emacs just
neeeds to support ConPTY so the hack you are submitting is not
necessary." :-/

OTOH, MSYS2 mintty (and probably upstream Cygwin's too) now support
ConPTY. As that is a console emulator probably it doesn't care about the
encoding issue?

Re: Windows Pseudo Console support

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2022 18:10:39 +0200
> 
> OTOH, MSYS2 mintty (and probably upstream Cygwin's too) now support
> ConPTY. As that is a console emulator probably it doesn't care about the
> encoding issue?

Terminal emulators are only dealing with console input/output of the
child processes, so the problems I mentioned in that issue are much
less relevant to them, AFAIU.

The point is that ConPTY is far from being a faithful emulation of
Unix PTYs; instead, it is really a kind of console device that is not
suited for dealing with anything but strictly console I/O, and
Windows-style console I/O on top of that.