Win32 console

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Win32 console is a text terminal window within the system of Windows API. A Win32 console has a screen buffer and an input buffer.

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. A console window may have several output buffers, only one of which is active (i.e. displayed) for a given moment.

The console window may be displayed as a normal window on the desktop, or may be switched to full screen to use the actual hardware text mode.

Programs may access a Win32 console either via high-level functions (such as ReadConsole and WriteConsole) or via low-level functions (e.g. ReadConsoleInput and WriteConsoleOutput).

Win32 consoles are typically used for applications that do not need to display images (e.g. for command line tools), including Terminal emulators, Perl, PHP (CLI), or FAR Manager, for example.

Win32 console applications are often mistaken for DOS applications, especially on Windows 9x and Me.

In earlier versions of Windows, there was no native support for consoles. Since Windows 3.1 and earlier was merely a graphical interface for MS-DOS, most text applications that ran on earlier Windows versions were actually MS-DOS applications running in "DOS boxes". To simplify the task of porting applications to Windows, early versions of Visual C++ were supplied with QuickWin, a library that implemented basic console functionality inside a regular Window.

1 Windows 9x and Me support
2 Unicode support
3 List of Win32 console functions
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Windows 9x and Me support

Windows 9x and Me support is relatively poor compared to Windows NT, because they had to display in a DOS VM that is also used for real DOS applications. Drives that are local to a DOS VM are not visible to a Win32 console application, because they run in the System VM. This can cause confusion.

[edit] Unicode support

Under Windows 95/98/Me, the screen buffer mirrors the structure of VGA text buffer, with two bytes per character cell: one byte for character code, one byte for attributes (the character must be in OEM character set, the attribute is with high-intensity background/no blinking). This speeds up operation considerably if the actual VGA text mode is used.

Under Windows NT/2000/XP, the screen buffer uses four bytes per character cell: two bytes for character code, two bytes for attributes. The character is then encoded as Unicode (UCS2). For backward compatibility, the console APIs exist in two versions: Unicode and non-Unicode. The non-Unicode versions of APIs can then use code page switching to extend the range of displayed characters (but only if TrueType fonts are used for the console window). Even UTF-8 is available as "code page 65001".