Microsoft is making the Windows command line a lot better

Who says you can't have both? I spend a lot of my day in a console/terminal window, but I'm not about to use Lynx for the bulk of my web browsing.

As for TFA, this is astoundingly overdue. This most recent gig involves using Windows for the first time in years. No worries, I'll load that new WSL I've been hearing about. Hey, look! A bash shell! On Windows! What will they think of next?

Except it's wrapped in a Windows console, which blows goats just as much as it ever did, the evidence list for which I need not repeat. MSFT can make some damned nice GUIs for simplifying complicated tasks. I guess the fallout is that their text-based UIs don't get as much love.

it might be more... but its still clearly not much. How many people with macbooks do you ever see pop open the terminal? I've seen even developers who've never had more than the most minimal interaction with command line interfaces. The normal person has likely not had even that much, and isn't going to switch unless absolutely forced to.

It might be the right thing, but relatively few actually recognize it as such, even if developers often do.

The point of Windows is Win32 and DirectX. At least for me: those are the two reasons I can't move to any other OS.

Command line interfaces are the right thing for server / workstation administration (both local and remote).

But what about everything else? Productivity, gaming, browsing?

The point is to take those devs disappointed with macOS as pretty UNIX to GNU/Windows.

I am pretty ok with Powershell and the state of command line on Windows since ever.

Windows has a better shell.

Practical example from a few days ago: here's feross' script to find compromised eslint-scope for Linux/Mac.

    find . -type d -name "eslint-scope" -print0 | xargs -n 1 -0 -I % sh -c "(cat %/package.json | npx json version) && echo '(at %)'" 

Here's an equivalent for Powershell:

    $results = @{}
    ls -recurse -filter "eslint-scope" | foreach {
      $file = "${_}\package.json" 
      $version = cat $file | convertfrom-json | select -ExpandProperty version
      $results.Add($file,$version)
    }
    echo $results | format-list

Rather than scrape for regexs, you're using objects.Rather than using xargs to iterate, you're actually iterating. JSON is built in, you use 'select' to pick the property you want. Formatting is seperate from presentation.

You can use (and probably should) use Python on nix for similar cleanliness, but Powershell does all this and still feels like a shell. It supports emacs bindings (you use emacs binding on bash by default, regardless of which editor you use), readline, you have a profile, and all the good things you expect from *nix (Windows /terminals/ generally suck, but using the inbuilt terminal with groupy it's decent). It's just way nicer, at the expense of a little learning.

as of win10, but too late for me to care.

Go to settings, enable it, save configuration.

Really painfull.