>> Let's be honest. What many people think of as "the default Windows command line", cmd.exe, is atrociously bad. Selection is awkward, resizing is hard, the syntax is arcane, the list goes on. If you do nothing else, there are two things you can do to make the basic, vanilla experience bearable.

Funny, from a guy coming from Windows to Unix I think the exact opposite. Each command comes with a bazillion options and the defaults are simply atrocious (to read the man, oy). Yes I understand that you can tailor each command in some startup script but why? It almost feels like every command needs to be created to solve 5 million things when 99% of the time you use it for 1 or 2 things. A few of my favorites:

Scripting:

A = 123 vs A= 123 vs A=123 should be the same!

Please use trim() in your program when parsing tokens!

Keyboard:

Please, for the love of god, make the keyboard behave like a keyboard. I don't want to be logged into some terminal and have the Backspace not behave like a backspace (^H??). Yes, I'm sure I can make it work via some, again, configuration magic or enter emacs mode, but, again, why?

cd.. should just work.

</rant>

Having been on unix for the last 7mo after years of windows, I do like some things but let's not be too quick to call the kettle black.