Hunting the Shmoo

Have you ever submitted a patch to Phabricator only to have reviewbot reveal dozens of lint errors all over? Or worse yet, have you landed before reviewbot had a chance to analyze your patch and been backed out over lint failures? If so fear not, we’ve all been there. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little embarrassed when it happens. Luckily for you, it’s pretty easy to eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again!

If you’re working with mozilla-central on Windows and followed the official documentation, there’s a good chance the MozillaBuild shell is running in the default cmd.exe console. If you’ve spent any amount of time in this console you’ve also likely noticed it leaves a bit to be desired. Standard terminal features such as tabs, splits and themes are missing. More importantly, it doesn’t render unicode characters (at least out of the box).

Luckily Microsoft has developed a modern terminal that can replace cmd.exe, and getting it set up with MozillaBuild shell is simple.