Window and Full Screen Modes
A Win32 console application may run in two modes.
One mode places the text in a window and uses an operating system's font rendering. In this mode, an application's interaction with user is controlled by the windowing system. This is analogous to X Window applications like xterm.
In a full screen mode Win32 console uses a hardware text mode and uploads a raster font to the video adapter. This is analogous to a text system console. Full screen uses Windows' built-in VGA driver, rather than any installed graphics drivers, unless another driver is VGA-compatible. Therefore, it only supports VGA-compatible text modes, giving it a maximum character resolution of 80 columns by 28 rows. This contrasts with comparable consoles in various other operating systems such as Linux, which are able to display higher resolutions through different drivers.
An application can be instantly switched between these two modes with Alt-↵ Enter key combination. Text environments in Unix-like systems usually do not have such feature.
Read more about this topic: Win32 Console
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