PuTTY wish win-command-prompt

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summary: Ability to backend on to a Windows command interpreter
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: mayhem: Probably impossible
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.
fixed-in: a55aac71e4fa6cf30f976da6727877c4cb117c96

Lots of people used to ask whether PuTTY would be able to act as a front end for Windows command interpreters (Command Prompt, bash, etc), in place of the not-very-pleasant standard console window.

Some advantages of this (and probably not all of them):

You get the same free choice of fonts as PuTTY has: no restriction to a strange subset of the system's available fonts.
You get the same copy-paste gestures as PuTTY: no mental gear-shifting when you have command prompts and SSH sessions open on the same desktop.
You get scrollback with the PuTTY semantics: scrolling to the bottom gets you to where the action is, as opposed to the way you could accidentally find yourself 500 lines past the end of the action in a real console.

This wishlist item was raised at Mayhem difficulty, because at the time it was originally suggested, there was essentially no way to do it reliably. I (SGT) did some experimental work, which involved instantiating a Windows console as a hidden window, and using the same console API used by applications running in the console to read out its screen buffer and transfer that into the PuTTY window. This was unreliable in corner cases (in particular, I never got keypresses like Ctrl-C to cause the right things to happen in the hidden console), and it involved some extremely intrusive refactoring of PuTTY itself (you basically needed two totally different shapes of backend, one emitting an escape-sequence stream fed to terminal.c and the other directly providing updates to a rectangular character grid.

But in 2018, Windows itself helped out, by introducing the new ConPTY interface, which means now the Windows API itself does the hard part, and all you have to do is to interpret the escape-sequence stream you get back.

As of 2021-05-08, we're now building an experimental pterm.exe for Windows. It's not part of the installer or putty.zip yet, and we might even delay linking to it from the Download page until it's had a bit more developer testing, but you can download a snapshot of it by hand using a URL analogous to the other links for direct download of development-snapshot .exe files. However, at this stage, if it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces!

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2021-05-08 18:22:25 +0100)