Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#1

Post by piuvas » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 12:29 AM UTC

And I don't mean terminal emulators, because I know Console Host, WT, Kitty, Alacritty. I mean shells like bash, zsh.

How come there are so many alternatives for linux but none for Windows?

Nothing against PowerShell, I'm just curious.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#2

Post by metadat » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

What classification does Cygwin fall under?

It can run most or all of the widespread *nix shells.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#3

Post by cloudking » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 12:49 AM UTC

You can get Linux shells and environments in Windows via WSL https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#4

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 12:49 AM UTC

Way back when there were a few substitutes for command.com, but none of them offered sufficiently utility to gain traction outside of the IT department. And since it's now trivially easy to run a unix virtual machine and do your command line stuff there if you want, I'm not sure there's much inventive to develop alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#5

Post by andrewf » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 12:56 AM UTC

There's 4DOS descendent Take Command: https://jpsoft.com/

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#6

Post by melony » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 1:07 AM UTC

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/git-bash

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#7

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 1:11 AM UTC

cloudking wrote: post #3

You can get Linux shells and environments in Windows via WSL https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

Yep, WSL is the way to go, specifically WSL2 if you want more IO performance.

Very convenient on my work laptop where I can't replace the OS.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#8

Post by spacechild1 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

I always use the Msys2 shell.

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#9

Post by Kukumber » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 1:19 AM UTC

I personally don't count powershell as a shell, it's more like an interpreted/jit compiled .net interactive CLI 'shell', hence why it is slow to start and to run

A shell is a program that takes your commands and send them to the OS, it doesn't compile anything

Re: Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

#10

Post by delta_p_delta_x » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC

Why not PowerShell, though? If you ever want to directly administer Windows through the command-line, PowerShell is increasingly your only bet, as older CMD executables are deprecated.

I'll suffix with my opinion that PowerShell is much nicer than many POSIX shells, especially given its hybrid object-oriented + functional pipeline paradigm.