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