Console Windows

Windows Console is the infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows. An instance of a Windows Console has a screen buffer and an input buffer. It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode (so as to occupy the entire screen). The user can switch between the two using the key combination. The text mode is unavailable in Windows Vista and later. Starting with Windows 10, however, a native full-screen mode is available. Windows Console instances are typically used for apps that do not need to display images but might use color. Examples include cmd.exe, Windows PowerShell, Far Manager, and Midnight Commander. In 2019, the Windows Console infrastructure was open-sourced under the MIT License, alongside Windows Terminal. In Windows, a console application may run in two modes. One mode places the text in a window and uses an operating system's font rendering. In this mode, an application's interaction with user is controlled by the windowing system. This is analogous to X Window System applications such as xterm. The second is the full-screen mode. In Windows XP and earlier, the full-screen console uses a hardware text mode and uploads a raster font to the video adapter. This is analogous to a text system console. This early full-screen mode only supports VGA-compatible text modes, giving it a maximum character resolution of 80 columns by 28 rows. This mode was deprecated in Windows Vista. It was possible to circumvent this issue by installing a Windows XP display driver; however, Windows 8 and later do not accept them. Windows 10 features a full-screen mode once again, but this implementation uses the native Windows rendering subsystem, instead of the text mode. It can have as many columns and rows as fits on the screen. Apps can be made to switch between the two modes using the key combination. The input buffer is a queue where events are stored (from keyboard, mouse etc.). The output buffer is a rectangular grid where characters are stored, together with their attributes.