Console: Potential Breaking Changes

Shipped (GA)

Windows 24H2

• CHAR_INFOs are now strictly sanitized
  Up until #13321 it was possible to treat the terminal as a strict NxM matrix of text storage. Since conhost's text renderer only used the leading half of a 2-column wide glyph (the COMMON_LVB_LEADING_BYTE) you could put anything you wanted to into the trailing half and "smuggle" data. This change makes this impossible and will now also ignore the trailing half when being read from console APIs. This however breaks any application that tries to read wide glyphs with ReadConsoleOutputW that were previously written with WriteConsoleOutputA, as this previously returned 2 CHAR_INFOs containing some UnicodeChar, followed by a 0xFFFF, but now will return that UnicodeChar twice. Concatenating the CHAR_INFOs into a string for instance, will now be broken. Furthermore there are 2 more minor breaking changes: ReadConsoleOutputA will now zero the high byte of UnicodeChar at all times and zero AsciiChar as well, if the conversion to the requested code page failed.
  • Introduced In: #13321
  • Ingested In: !9777763
  • First Insider Release: 10.0.26040.0
  • Servicing Candidate: No
• Wide glyphs cannot be stored into 1 column anymore
  #13626 extends upon #13321 and now makes it impossible to store 2 column wide glyphs into just a single column. With this change in place, text will now always be stored and rendered consistently and such usage of conhost will simply result in the request being ignored or whitespace to be stored.
  • Introduced In: #13626
  • Ingested In: !9777763
  • First Insider Release: 10.0.26040.0
  • Servicing Candidate: No
• ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING is now per screen buffer state
  #14735 changes the behavior of ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING with regards to multiple screen buffers. Specifically, people who were enabling VT processing on the new buffer and then expecting it to stay enabled on the other buffer will observe that it is not enabled.
  • Introduced In: #14735
  • Ingested In: !9777763
  • First Insider Release: 10.0.26040.0
  • Servicing Candidate: No
• The codepage attribute on .lnk files is now used
  #15111 fixed a bug where Conhost (v2) was ignoring the codepage set in lnk files. This fix will result in saved codepages being respected once again.
  • Introduced In: #15111
  • Ingested In: !9777763
  • First Insider Release: 10.0.26040.0
  • Servicing Candidate: No

Shipped (Insiders)

Unshipped, Uningested into Windows

• Zero-width characters are now 0 columns wide; Ambiguous width glyphs are always 1 column wide
  #16916 adds support for grapheme clusters, which changes the width of zero-width and combining characters from 1 to 0 columns.
  Additionally, ambiguous width glyphs now default to a width of 1 column instead of depending on the currently selected font. This matches the behavior of Windows Terminal since v0.6.
  • Introduced In: #16916
  • Ingested In: TBD
  • First Insider Release: TBD
  • Servicing Candidate: No