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Add a recommended terminal for Windows to README #35960

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May 21, 2020
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@musm musm commented May 20, 2020

I have also updated https://julialang.org/downloads/platform/ to include similar instructions, CF JuliaLang/www.julialang.org#825

@musm musm added the docs This change adds or pertains to documentation label May 20, 2020
@@ -134,6 +134,9 @@ The Julia REPL is quite powerful. See the section in the manual on
[the Julia REPL](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/REPL/)
for more details.

On Windows we highly recommend running Julia using a modern terminal,
such as installing the [Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store](https://aka.ms/terminal).
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Probably need some comment on how to use Julia from this terminal, since double-clicking julia.exe will open the console.

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We have more detailed instructions here https://julialang.org/downloads/platform/
Perhaps a little out of place to provide more details here? I think it would be better to add more details to the download page.

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Are you sure instructions are there? I think Steven is saying that installing Windows Terminal is not enough. How do you run Julia in Windows Terminal? And especially how to make this happen by simply clicking on julia.exe shortcut?

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Fair enough, we can add more instructions over at JuliaLang.org, but I don't think adding more than this is appropriate for the README

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Definitely should not be in the README. Ideally the installation instructions should be in the Julia documentation. For now, we should put them on the website - where they currently live.

Also, I feel we don't want to recommend Windows terminal, since it doesn't work on Windows 7, for example. Is there a generic way to describe what terminal is required and then list Windows terminal as one of the examples?

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If using an alternative terminal with Julia is so complicated that we can't even document it clearly, that's not a good sign for the ability of new, unsophisticated users to be able to take our advice.

We probably need a dedicated page in the documentation, and then link to it from the README and various other places.

And we definitely need to clearly document how to do it with Windows < 10.

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I think the non-Terminal instructions should be literally what I do with my Windows 7 VM. Install git-bash, and start Julia with the full path.

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If using an alternative terminal with Julia is so complicated that we can't even document it clearly, that's not a good sign for the ability of new, unsophisticated users to be able to take our advice.

It really isn't. The only issue is people on Windows 7, which is a 10 year old OS not even supported by Microsoft at this point, yet for some reason we need to accommodate them in the instructions.

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You don't need to do anything you don't like doing! Out binaries work on very old macOS releases as well as Linux releases too. We have people also who like to use Julia on processors that are ten years old.

We will not go out of our way to support these old things. But there is no reason to drop something that works when all we need to do is write a couple of lines.

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@KristofferC KristofferC May 21, 2020

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"Dropping" something doesn't mean it suddenly stops working. I think it literally means

We will not go out of our way to support these old things.

@ViralBShah ViralBShah merged commit 6beec65 into master May 21, 2020
@ViralBShah ViralBShah deleted the readmwin branch May 21, 2020 14:38
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ViralBShah commented May 21, 2020

Merging this. The other tasks can be in follow-up PRs. The installation related instructions, which are in doc/build at the moment should probably be in the manual. #35122

simeonschaub pushed a commit to simeonschaub/julia that referenced this pull request Aug 11, 2020
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fonsp commented Sep 2, 2020

From @musm:

What we can do is create a .bat called Start Julia using the Windows Terminal which could check if Windows Terminal exists and launch Julia from there if it exists. This would be a temporary solution, until OS level integration of the Windows Terminal is incorporated.

I wrote this .bat file today, but I realized that I see no improvement in UX when using the Windows Terminal - unicode support is equally bad, the only advantage that I found are anti-aliased fonts.

What am I missing - why do we recommend users to install the Windows Terminal?

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musm commented Sep 2, 2020

Unicode support is generally related to the font you are using so if you are using a font without many Unicode glyphs then that would explain your issue. What exactly is the rendering issue?

There's too many advantages of the Windows Terminal to list here compared to conhost. To get improved support you will need to use the nightly builds, since they require libuv updates that are not available on 1.5. E.g. we finally get 24-bit color support in Julia (test using julia-nightly builds to try that). I'm quite surprised you say there's no improvement in UX compared to conhost, I find the opposite to be true: there's too many improvements to list compared to conhost.... multiple tabs/split panes/search/24-bit color/rendering/ the list is large.

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fonsp commented Sep 2, 2020

Yeah I am puzzled by the rendering issue. It's not a problem with the font - it works on WSL and SSH:

image

but on powershell and cmd.exe, the glyphs don't render, and the indexing is off: (the caret is at the end of the line in this screenshot)

image

a😀💩

(I don't think that this is an issue with Julia, maybe we should discuss this elsewhere?)

there's too many improvements to list compared to conhost.... multiple tabs/split panes/search/24-bit color/rendering/ the list is large.

You're right, thanks 👍

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Try with nightly, I think some of these things have gotten fixed.

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musm commented Sep 2, 2020

Ah so you are looking for emoji support, well I'm still waiting on libuv folks to merge libuv/libuv#2971 which we will then need to backport to our libuv branch to get emojis to pass through.

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musm commented Sep 2, 2020

BTW just use

. "C:\users\fonsv\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia 1.5.1\bin\julia.exe"

instead of start-process ....

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musm commented Sep 10, 2020

@fonsp fixed on nightly now 😎

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fonsp commented Sep 11, 2020

The emoji problem? Awesome! Thanks so much!

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