Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Totally agreed, I always use slash, and never use backslash, because I'm a 20 year nix user, and: powershell doesn't care. try it.

View on HN

Powershell doesn't but not everything is powershell. Win32 underneath pokes its head out occasionally. And I don't want to use powershell. It's horrid in so many ways.

I'm a Unix user since about '93 for ref as well. I am poisoned with forward slashes everywhere :)

MS-DOS (and Windows) have supported forward slashes as path separators since PC-DOS 2.0, despite defaulting to backslash. Anywhere where the forward slash isn't supported is a bug either in Windows or (more likely) in the app that won't accept them.

I use forward slashes a lot on Windows but tab completion in cmd.exe only works with backslashes.

Yeah, that's a shortcoming with cmd.exe. At least PowerShell will switch slashes to whichever is default for the platform, but I doubt that supporting fore-slash tab completion in cmd.exe would be able to crawl out of the -100pt hole.

That makes sense: I don't do anything on Windows command line that isn't powershell. Give it a chance: install PSCX, openssh, and conemu, configure your emacs keybindings, steal my profile (https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile) and learn, at minimum, 'where', 'get-member' and 'select' before you make your mind up on anything.

> And I don't want to use powershell. It's horrid in so many ways.

Name one that isn't just "Bourne Shell does it different".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com