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Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

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Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#41

Just another reason to stay away from Windows as a platform. Windows 10 is a moving target if you are trying to work with it.

If you're not a fan of change, I feel like software development probably isn't the right career choice.

I am a fan of change. Likely similar to the parent of your comment, I am a fan of change when I can control when those changes happen.

With Windows 10 I am sadly realising that I have very little control over when things change and even less knowledge of what those changes will be. For software, this is a nightmare. As a maintainer, I will never know what changes are going to affect my software if I am not informed.

As a user, I no longer know when a feature of my computer that I use daily will disappear. If I used cmd yesterday, will it disappear tomorrow?

Who wants to be the passenger let alone the driver of a car if it steers and accelerates randomly despite your best efforts to steer it and drive it? Would you get in a car that removed the gearstick without warning? Would you really want to be in a car that accelerated and steered at whim?

This is what Windows 10 feels like, particularly compared to my 20 years of using Windows prior to it (Win3.11, 95, 98, Me for a day, XP, Vista for as little as possible, 7 for a lengthy time). With each of those releases, updates were applied by me in a timely manner, with the crucial point being that I could apply updates when I found it applicable for my own personal machine. I could read up on the release notes for each update and service pack to see what was changed.

With Windows 10, I get updates applied in a phantom fashion and do not know what they contain. It's like Apple's vague "fixed an issue" release notes.

EDIT: I must state that the removal of features is not unique to Microsoft, given that sweeping changes affected my Mac after every release since Snow Leopard. However, the key difference is that with Windows 10 you will never have control over when things are installed (unless you use some of the finer controls for updates available with GPOs in an enterprise; still what's the point of having an AD when you don't have full control over the endpoint systems?)

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#45
post #42
post #16

Hopefully one day Bash will be the default Windows CLI.

Or maybe a compatibility layer, where they integrate the most common bash commands and Unix utilities. I prefer Git Bash when on Windows for this reason.

There is a compatibility layer now, it just happens to be a complete Ubuntu environment.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#47
post #35

Something that irks me is how PowerShell’s default aliases take precedence over binaries in the PATH. To be able to use the GNU utils, you have to put this in your profile.ps1 : Remove-Item Alias:cat Remove-Item Alias:cp Remove-Item Alias:curl Remove-Item Alias:echo Remove-Item Alias:ls Remove-Item Alias:man Remove-Item Alias:mv Remove-Item Alias:pwd Remove-Item Alias:rm Remove-Item Alias:wget

How would an alias work otherwise? That's pretty much the way it behaves in Unix, too (e.g. 'ls' in most default configs).

Although I'd still consider curl/wget to be specific tools and not generic commands, so emulating them seems a bit weird.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#48
post #33
post #27

Btw did anyone noticed that in windows 10 you can resize cmd.exe to more than 80 characters width! When I first saw it I almost cried.

I don't remember ever not having that feature, so it must be around ever since XP. Right click window -> Properties -> Layout.

OP means you can drag the window wider - no need to alter properties anywhere ;)

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#49
post #25

Having repl of some strange CLR language as primary shell is weird but having port of DOS shell is weird too.

if you put it this way, having a repl of an organically grown language that can barely do arithmetic is weird, too.

Re: Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

#50
post #11

So basically instead of doing dir C:\ I have to learn to type List-Directory-With-Files Drive=C Folder=/ (made up example, but you get the point)

Both DIR and LS do list directories in PowerShell. But all parameters on DIR and LS seem to result in errors, even "dir /h", "dir /?", "dir -h", "dir --help", etc. That is a bit annoying.

DIR and LS are both aliases for Get-ChildItem, which doesn't support the flags you're after.
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