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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I think the verboseness is a huge turn-off for beginners --- it's like a mix of C# and bash. The general prevalence of uppercase characters (I believe it's case-insensitive like a lot of Windows things, so I don't really understand why they had to capitalise words which are already hyphen-separated) also adds to the overall "clumsy" look.

In contrast, bash scripting is basically entirely lowercase with very minor exceptions.

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A notable thing about unix commands is that they're usually very short: "cd", "ls", "grep", "sed", "cat", etc. This is obviously a remnant of earlier times, but I actually think that it serves the unix command quite well even today. These are commands you want to type quickly and many right after another. Powershell's "Get-ChildItem" and "Select-String" are annoyingly verbose in comparison.

Get-ChildItem is gci. For Select-String I don't think there is a shorter version. Many of the commands have shorter aliases they are just not as intuitive.

/r/PowerShell is really helpful if you are stuck also there is a Slack POSH group that is really helpful.

On my W10 machine select-string was aliased to grep. Almost every command was already aliased.

get-content -> cat

set-location -> cd

get-childitem -> ls

etc

"sls" is select-string.

Get-Alias to see them all. "get-alias -Definition Select-String" to look for one for a specific command.

I absolutely love C#, and I also really like bash.

But powershell just looks so damned ugly to me! It's too verbose, and the idiomatic Pascal-Kebab-Case thing is just weird.

I know powershell has aliases for common things, like `ls` or `wget`, but your scripts are no longer cross-platform if you use them, as you'll use the powershell functions on Windows, but the Linux commands on Linux.

I've tried so hard to like it for so long, but I just... can't.

It does come with a ton of aliases to shorten up the names. I do find pwsh commands to be much more memberable than bash because of the verboseness and full named flags/switches.

I've become a massive fan of PowerShell. Getting used to using TAB-completion helps immensely, as do the aliases like you mentioned.

For TAB-completion I use MenuComplete instead of the default (Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete) as it gives you IPython-like completion menus. With something like posh-git, it's amazing: you can type git checkout and then press TAB and have an interactive menu of the branches you can switch to; or if you've done a 'git status' you can then do git add, press TAB and you get a menu that intelligently shows you what files you might want to add.

Thanks I'm going to check this out. The only thing I miss in pwsh is fish like suggestions when typing.

That's pretty great.

My problem with powershell is it's verb-noun, I want to tab complete on Network, not get-Network

Thanks for the pro tip! I just switched over to this and immediately noticed a huge improvement in my powershell experience :)

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