Autosuggestions are hard to read on old windows cmd.exe

[anntzer]

The old cmd.exe does not support dim text (see e.g. tartley/colorama#305 -- which admittedly only shows that a popular text-coloring library does not support dim text on Windows, but still...), so autosuggestions are rendered as normal text, which makes the whole thing rather difficult to read (you end up with a block of white text and a cursor in the middle as if in "text replace" mode).
I would suggest to detect this setup and disable autosuggestion by default in that case (or make enable_autosuggestion a tri-state True/False/"auto" (i.e. True except on cmd.exe)).
Note that things render just fine on the more modern windows terminals.

[Carreau]

Do you know how to detect this ?

[anntzer]

No guarantees, but the following seems to work: use psutil.Process().parent().parent().<etc>.name() to lookup the parent process chain. The current process will be python.exe; it can have a parent of ipython.exe (if ipython was launched as "ipython" from the command line) or this parent can be skipped; the next parent will then be the shell (e.g., "cmd.exe"). The parent of cmd.exe will then be either "explorer.exe" (old-style terminal, no support for dim text -- my guess is that "cmd.exe's parent is explorer.exe" would be a good condition where to disable autosuggestions) or the newer "WindowsTerminal.exe" (which does support dim text) -- or possibly other terminals.

[bollwyvl]

I'm a VM-only windows user, but: use of the new windows terminal is so life-changing to that experienece vs cmd.exe, it's hard to overestimate. They've preserved all the important bugs, unlike powershell/cmder/wsl, so old, important scripts work as intended when written 30 years ago, but is not an entirely broken UI.

[anntzer]

I know, I use the windows terminal whenever I can, but some machines (e.g. tethered to specific lab equipement items) are effectively non-upgradeable.

[MrMino]

@bollwyvl @anntzer could one of you post a screenshot of this issue please?

[anntzer]

Note the cursor under the "n"; everything after was autocompleted.