So Windows finally has pty support: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/

However, the API is a bit weird. Unlike Unix, when you create a Windows pty, there's no way to directly get access to the "slave" handle. Instead, you first call CreatePseudoConsole to get a special "HPCON" object, which is similar to a Unix pty master. And then you can have to use a special CreateProcess incantation to spawn a child process that's attached to our pty.

Specifically, what you have to do is set a special entry in the "lpAttributeList", with type "PROC_THREAD_ATTRIBUTE_PSEUDOCONSOLE".

Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/creating-a-pseudoconsole-session

Unfortunately, the subprocess module does not provide any way to pass arbitrary attributes through lpAttributeList, which means that it's currently impossible to use pty support on Windows without reimplementing the whole subprocess module.

It would be nice if the subprocess module could somehow support this.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three possible APIs:

Option 1: full support for Windows ptys: this would require wrapping CreatePseudoConsole, providing some object to represent a Windows pty, etc. This is fairly complex (especially since CreatePseudoConsole requires you to pass in some pipe handles, and the user might want to create those themselves).

Option 2: minimal support for Windows ptys: add another supported field to the subprocess module's lpAttributeList wrapper, that lets the user pass in an "HPCON" cast to a Python integer, and stuffs it into the attribute list. This would require users to do all the work to actually *get* the HPCON object, but at least it would make ptys possible to use.

Option 3: generic support for unrecognized lpAttributeList entries: add a field to the subprocess module's lpAttributeList wrapper that lets you add arbitrary entries, specified by type number + arbitrary pointer/chunk of bytes. (Similar to how Python's ioctl or setsockopt wrappers work.) Annoyingly, it doesn't seem to be enough to just pass in a buffer object, because for pseudoconsole support, you actually have to pass in an opaque "HPCON" object directly. (This is kind of weird, and might even be a bug, see: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/6705)