I have some good news about the Windows command line console, conhost.exe. In this blog post, I’m joined by our two console developers, Michael Niksa and Paul Campbell. We’d like to give you an overview of what’s been changed since the console was last updated. You can check out the improved console today in the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
The changes discussed here are just the start of the console updates we are working on for Windows 10, but we hope you’ll like them. Let’s start with a quick look at the architectural mods and then get into the new features.
Architecture update
Many people consider CMD, PowerShell, or their favorite alternate command line as the console, but it is more subtle than that. Each of these are character-mode applications that run within conhost.exe, the console host, otherwise known simply as the console. The console is responsible for accepting keyboard and mouse input, drawing text to the screen, providing memory buffers and presenting an API for apps to use.
