Microsoft Is Updating the Windows Console Colors For the First Time In 20 Years (theverge.com) 142
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is giving its Windows Console (Command Prompt) a color overhaul. Windows 10 testers will be able to try out the new color scheme in a new build (16257) that will available later today. Windows Console's legacy blue is getting a subtle change to make it more legible on modern high-contrast displays, alongside color changes to the entire scheme. Windows 10 testers will only see the new colors if they clean install build 16257, and if you upgrade you'll keep the legacy colors to ensure any custom color settings are not replaced. Microsoft is planning to release a tool soon that will allow Windows 10 testers to apply the new color scheme and a selection of alternatives. Developers, you can thank Microsoft summer intern Craig Loewen for the overhaul.
It's blue?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It's blue?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how this is a "new feature". You've been able to change the colors to anything you want for as long as I can remember.
Properties --> Colors
I guess they've given up on fixing the billion other things that are wrong with Windows 10.
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I guess they've given up on fixing the billion other things that are wrong with Windows 10.
When every bug you fix introduces two new problems, the only way to win the game is not to play. :(
Re:It's blue?! (Score:5, Informative)
I think you've misunderstood a bit. I had the same first reaction as you, but then read the article.
They changed the colors used to represent the colors you can change to.
For example, I've always changed mine to a yellow or bright green on dark blue background. If you look at the examples in the article, you can see that was a very high contrast but somewhat restful combination before. It is now actually reduced in contrast and I can't see a color combination in the new example that I would find comfortable.
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I don't think anyone would ever need more than that.
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In the beginning was the CGA/EGA 16-color text mode palette.
They've adjusted some of those colors a little bit.
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OMG It's 1990 and X Windows lets you select Cornflower Blue, or any of dozens of similarly odd color names, to any part of your 'command' window
I am left wondering why it took so damned long for MS to do the same, since they pretty much ripped of the whole X Windows idea in the first place
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someone must have had his grande latte enema.
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downmodded troll? have you people not seen fight club? :(
Re:It's blue?! (Score:4, Funny)
Don't talk about Fight Club.
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Sounds like you're envious. Just not green with envy.
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Isn't blue background the powershell default?
Like you, I prefer to work white/green on black. Some of the newer utility color schemes (vim) suck with a black background, so you need either turn off the colors or change background to white.
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VT-52 green is a wonderful fashion statement
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The times I've had to use windows, it always seemed to turn blue soon enough . . . :)
hawk
It's a black and blue issue... (Score:3)
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I always changed the cmd colors. Yellow on black for my non-Admin account and Cyan on Black for my Admin account. All I had to do is look to see what account the cmd window was using. Started doing this with Windows NT 3.0 (yup a Windows NT Beta tester here) I never looked back.
Although I now use Bright Green on a Dark green background for my "local" account on most of my machines now. But this article is bogus in that you have been able to change colors to what you want in the CMD window for ---- decades.
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Trolling aside, for a long time I've been using that capability to set my terminals to a palette based on the popular "Solarized light" scheme (but even a little more muted). Now I can look at the output of a "ls /dev" command, and not have my eyes bleed.
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Here's a nickel, go buy yourself a real computer system
Now, that's a genuine oldie. [dilbert.com]
We've had ... (Score:2)
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The colors also used to be configurable
To digress: I remember the time when the BSOD screen saver made it's way around our company. Numerous calls were made to IT support when people would leave their PC for a few minutes and return to what looked like a crashed system.
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Nethack (Score:2)
Looks like the new color scheme would make it much easier to spot floating eyes.
That was my motivation for making a similar change to the blue on my xterm.
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I play blindfolded. And die a lot.
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Ha! That was the first thing I thought of as well. That's why I always change the default CGA-ish Dark blue in various terminals to "DodgerBlue"
I also change DIR 01;34 to DIR 37;44 in /etc/DIR_COLORS (it makes directory names show up as white text on a light blue background)
"Nothing new under the sun" ANSI.SYS (Score:4, Informative)
See subject: This is an old trick you could do in DOS via ANSI.SYS loading in config.sys ala DEVICE = C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS & then in autoexec.bat using $e[xx;yy;zzm
where xx = attribute code, yy = foreground color code, and zz = background color code.
A table of the color codes follows:
Code Color
0 Turn Off Attributes
1 High Intensity
2 Normal Intensity
4 Underline (mono only)
5 Blink
7 Reverse Video
8 Invisible
30 Black
31 Red
32 Green
33 Yellow
34 Blue
35 Magenta
36 Cyan
37 White
40 Black
41 Red
42 Green
43 Yellow
44 Blue
45 Magenta
46 Cyan
47 White
For example, the following command will result in a bright red C:\> prompt and bright yellow text on a blue background.
C:\> prompt $e[1;31;44m$p$g$e[1;33;44m
APK
P.S.=> See subject - it's been done, long ago.. apk
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Comprehension Fail. (Score:2)
The article has nothing to do with changing your console prompt to a set of predefined colours. The change here is that the pre-defined colours have been changed so that you can actually read 34 on 40 for example.
Re:"Nothing new under the sun" ANSI.SYS (Score:4)
They have actually redefined the RGB values of those colours, supposedly to better suit LCD monitors.
You couldn't do that originally under DOS because the various graphics adaptors of the day emulated ancient text modes that only supported digital colour and half-bright. That is, each of the red, green and blue channels could be binary on/off and a binary half brightness applied to all of them, so the available colours were (hex RGB values):
000 black
00F blue
0F0 green
0FF cyan
F00 red
F0F magenta
FF0 yellow
FFF white
007 dark blue
070 dark green
077 dark cyan
700 dark red
707 dark magenta
770 dark yellow
777 grey (default text colour in DOS)
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I shouldn't have typed that out from a screenshot. There were two extra semi-colons. Apparently this also works on the latest Windows 10 bash shell, so I guess they added support there first and TFA is about a partial backport to Windows native shells.
awk 'BEGIN{
s="/\\/\\/\\/\\/\\"; s=s s s s s s s s;
for (colnum=0; colnum 255) g = 510-g;
printf "\033[48;2;%d;%d;%dm", r,g,b;
printf "\033[38;2;%d;%d;%dm", 255-r, 255-g, 255-b;
Command Prompt is black. Powershell is blue. (Score:5, Informative)
Which black, which blue? (Score:1)
Which black, which blue? :-)
Read the actual Microsoft information [microsoft.com], it's actually conhost.exe (which is the actual 'console renderer' -- think 'xterm' in linux terms); used by powershell AND cmd (and any other console-mode program).
And it's about redefining the ANSI colours to RGB value mapping (e.g., DARK_BLUE goes from 0,0,128 to 0,55,128. lightening it somewhat to be appealing on today's higher contrast displays.) It's still blue, it's just a different blue.
And it's the default mapping being changed (so
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Maybe you should try reading TFA beforing concluding the story is wrong. This is not about the background, it is about the coloring scheme defaults in cmd.exe. I agree it is a bit far-fetched to call this an overhaul though.
Wow, just wow (Score:5, Insightful)
We should all be grateful that the insanely talented coders at Microsoft were able to perform such a thrilling technical feat. It must have been incredibly difficult, as evidenced by how long it took.
This is no doubt why Windows 10 is so buggy, since so many team members were slaving away adding colors to the terminal window instead of actually, you know, trying to fix the operating system.
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Multiple work spaces have existed from 1990s in all unix systems. Even now in Win10, finally some lame way MS has implemented it. Still does not allow windows to moved easily or pinned. Worst thing, there is no indication to tell which work space you are in. No way to customize it. One of the first things I did when I joi
Re:Wow, just wow (Score:4, Funny)
Do you have *any* idea how much telemetry they need to go through? Every click, every window, every interaction -- everything!
Once Team Windows gets that telemetry data back from the NSA, they still need to sift through it, and then look for ways to improve the OS.
But once they start getting caught up, you'll see more game changing improvements out of Redmond.
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since so many team members were slaving away adding colors to the terminal window
Slashdot fail. When making a hyperbolic claim you need to reference something in TFA, not TFS. There's always a risk someone may read TFS and then point out that this was done by a single summer intern.
Or maybe you're making a subtle joke that all of Windows 10 is managed by one summer intern in which case I tip my hat to you.
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Whatever are we going to do when we don't have to click an icon and select a sub-menu item to paste?
You have been able to paste into the console by just right-clicking since Windows XP. All you had to do was turn on Quick Edit mode. It's on by default in later versions of Windows.
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It doesn't work in all contexts. It can't be triggered with Control+V or Shift+Insert.
I've taken to using Alt+Space, E, P as a "shortcut" when I have to paste into a cmd.exe terminal.
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Because I'd have to move my hand to the mouse.
And Windows 10? NO THX.
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Seriously? This is news? Why the fuck is this news? This has been basic fucking functionality in unix operating systems for decades. Decades! Hell even as APK said in another post, you used to be able to do this in DOS.
I mean...WTF
Not sure how it's news at all. All they did was tweak the color pallet a bit. You have been able to change the colors for as long as I can remember. In windows it's in the console properties menu.
I guess it is time to start using windows again (Score:1)
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Windows console - now in COLOR!
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I mean after all if they are fixing unimportant things like this it must mean that they have fixed every other bug in existence. It will be wonderful to finally get to use 100% bug free software.
No need for sarcasm... Microsoft has had bug free software since 1981, it's called DOS, although they didn't write it - maybe that's why.
Also coming easter egg along with that (Score:2)
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The BSOD Blue Screen of Death is also getting an overhaul, and it would inherit the color scheme from the upgraded console. No longer limited to the standard blue, you can have a choice of translucent, iridescent, fluorescent, speckled and coruscant versions of blue.
No it's more advanced than that... the BSOD themes are going to be in-death purchases, the transactions will be handled by a intel ME firmware module to allow the system to continue crashing unhindered.
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STOP 0x69696969 PERMANENT_SHUTDOWN_COMPULSATOR_NOT_FOUND
Pure innovation (Score:2)
This is ground breaking and truly innovative.
Who cares about having multiple tabs or unicode? The reason why millions switched to mac os x was that the blue in the console was too dark.
Wow! What a breakthrough! (Score:2)
Too much hype (Score:2)
What about the color command? (Score:1)
C:\>COLOR AB
Where : A is background color and B: Is forreground color.
Colors could be like:
0: Black
1: Blue
2: Green
3: Cyan
4: Red
5: Purple
6: Yellow
7: White
8: Gray
9: Light Blue
A: Light Green
B: Light Cyan
C: Light Red
D: Light Purple
E:Light Yellow
F: Bright White
See? After 20 years in beta, (Score:2)
Windows Version one-point-oh finally hits primetime!
Kinda odd how everyone refers to this version as "ten"
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Reeks of advertorialism (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
Yeah right. If MS is paying attention to small things that matter and things developers (and other people) were asking for, why then they did not restore Classic style? Or disable telemetry...? Or refrain from forcing updates down our throats...?
The original article is nothing but blatant ad copy thinly disguised as editorial content. In other words, an advertorial.
fix the damn scroll buffer (Score:2)
your text paints like I'm on a 300 baud modem and the scroll buffer is unusable. Fix fundamental issues with the app, you can already get far better console apps like cmder for windows, you should worry about coming to usability parity before freaking colors.
ConEmu (Score:1)
20 years and that's all we get?! The console with DOS 25 years ago was more powerful than what we have today! After decades of waiting for something _at_least_ as good as we had back then, I got sick of waiting and found ConEmu. It's a wonderful console. I can't imagine ever going back to the built-in Windows console.
How about implementing Copy and Paste properly? (Score:2)
I'm using an alternative shell because the standard Windows one still doesn't support selection with the mouse, or the standard Ctrl-X/C/V shortcuts.
Console has more problems than this (Score:2)
Compare Conemu or other console replacements to the default and it's quite obvious it has more problems than a simple colour scheme. Just being able to horizontally resize the console would be nice, or allowing it to handle standard escape codes, or selection / copy behaviour or usin
No. (Score:2)