Windows Terminal

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I have been testing out all sorts of terminal applications on Windows like CmEMU, GitBash, CMDer and many others and frankly, working inside it with Elixir leaves a lot to be desired from working in Terminal on MacOS and Linux.

Now Microsoft has release a pretty cool Windows Terminal, and working in iex is exactly the same. No tab complete, no formatting to speak of, no colors. This is such a big feature of working in IEX.

Is there a push or interest in making the Windows Terminal more useful, or is there some switch or configuration that I am missing?
iex-powershell iex-terminal

iex-ubuntu-lsb
iex-ubuntu-lsb708Ă—260 3.61 KB

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The various Bashes for Windows should work. At least color.

Another thing you can try is to use the --werl switch. It will open a separate window.

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Tab complete and colors work for me on the new windows terminal. I just installed it.
Tab and colors also work with the old wsl/ubuntu/cmd terminal and hyper.

Hyper is heavy on the memory but here is the link in case you haven’t seen it. https://hyper.is

Edit: Colors and tab works with WSL but not with native elixir with command prompt/cmd for me.

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Wow… A stripped down chrome(ium) just to display some textual information… Yes, that one needs a lot of memory for sure…

I’m pretty sure there are a lot of alternatives that’d work as well as hyper and use a lot less memory…

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I used Hyper.js + git bash + elixir installed on windows at first and it can’t use tab to auto complete in iex
after I switch to Window Terminal + WSL (ubuntu) + elixir installed inside WSL everything works fine, not seeing any issue now.

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In CMD you can just do this:

iex.bat --werl -S mix

It opens a new window which has tab completion at least. Colors though, no.

1 Like
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This does not TAB complete

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Did you do anything? Did you run IEX through a bash linux shell ? I wasn’t clear on this, but this should work on windows command line interfaces like new terminal in cmd and powershell.
That it works under Linux subsystem is not what I am after

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For me it has tab completion working though. Strange.

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CMD and Powershell work fundamentally different from the emulators or TTYs you’d use under Linux. That’s why the --werl workaround has been created by the Erlang folks. If it doesn’t work for you, then something is different with your setup from that of everyone else.

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I’m not able to get colors and tabbing working outside of WSL except when the command iex.bat --werl is ran from command prompt/cmd. Only tabs work for me with iex.bat --werl not colors.

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Same. But I don’t think colors were promised there.

1 Like
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Can the new terminal be used inside visual studio code?

I tried with the setting terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "wt.exe", but that loads terminal in a new windows and not within VSC.

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@zorglubb Please refer to Autocomplete in IEx broken (on Windows) · Issue #4103 · elixir-lang/elixir · GitHub

There’s a configuration section in the docs on how to setup custom shells. For your specific case, maybe it’s missing the full path?

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No, full path doesn’t change the behaviour. New terminal gets opened in a new window.

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window terminal is the UI for executing bash
same for visual studio code terminal, it’s a UI
so you don’t expect to have UI in another UI
what’s important is the executable in it

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But isn’t cmd.exe also an UI? That works inside.

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@Nefcairon Maybe reporting that on vscode’s Github could help?