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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

A loading screen?

You're probably better off just using a REPL at that point.

Eh, if you launch python in powershell there is still a loading delay, since powershell for some crazy reason takes like 30s to launch on a default win10 installation.

You must have something very wrong; neither Windows Powershell nor Powershell 7 takes 30s to launch.

But anyway, for a quick calc, is there anything faster than Spotlight (for mac)/Gnome shell (for linux)/Powertoys Run (for windows)? Instead of app name you are going to launch, just punch in your expression.

Probably very slow disk (VM?) or Windows Defender ? Or too much modules ?

All this time I've been launching calculator and I could have just done it in spotlight...

Why don't they tell you that after you've launched calculator for the 20th time in an hour.

Not the person you responded to but I have the same experience with Powershell as them. I just checked again to be sure and it takes 20s to start and become usable on my laptop. CMD.EXE, in comparison, starts instantly.

I'll be the next to confirm this, and on multiple machines.

Maybe 1 in 5 that I try will be a reasonable startup time.

That's interesting, it seems quite widespread.

I'm getting 1-2s on my machines, both just plain powershell and powershell inside windows terminal. No enterprise crap running though, just Defender.

It got bad enough I wrote a (now unused) script in batch instead of Powershell. Also having to explicitly enable scripting for each machine was a pain, though understandable.

I shudder to think what you're running Windows 10 on because it only takes 2 seconds to come up on this Celeron 2957U I'm using to browse the internet.

If it's a corporate system like my (presently only) Windows machine then I wouldn't be surprised. They manage to configure these things so they're as fast as a Pentium 133MHz processor from 25 years ago, even though you've got an 8-core i7 with 32GB of RAM.

I wouldn't either, our devs were given the standard issue Lenovo T480 which would have been mostly fine were it not for the fact that we had Raytheon ForcePoint DLP, LANDesk, Trend Micro Apex, WebSense, Cisco Amp, Cisco Umbrella, and who knows what else watching everything we did.

It took upgrading to i9s to get something that could run Teams and Outlook at the same time without audio stuttering during a voice call.

I'm running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 with 16GB of RAM and an NVMe drive. Powershell takes something between 0.5 to 1 second to start. The first ~20-30 seconds after the start it feels sluggish when doing simple tasks like listing directory contents. It makes it very unpleasant to use.

Sluggish behavior during and just after Windows startup is sometimes caused by mapped network drives that no longer resolve. Worth checking if you haven't already.

I'm talking about Powershell startup, not Windows startup.

why would you launch powershell to launch python? you can just launch python directly?

powershell is slow, just use a console window.

Or maybe starting anything on modern windows is slow.

Huh? I use powershell every single day at work and it loads instantly for me.

I've started using the browser console window more and more as a calculator. The only downsides are the a longer syntax (eg can't do 3^2) and that it is a tab in the browser. Variables and other such things are very useful.

I also often use the browser console for this as well. Just as a quick tip, you can use ** for exponentiation (e.g. 3**2 === 9)

I just have a hotkey that opens a Node CLI. I know some people who do a similar thing with Python, but I think JS is better at composing quick one-liners.

Why the console window? For basic math things that I sometimes need, I just enter stuff in the search/address bar, and it pops DDG or Google or whatever with the answer; and even your own example of "3^2" works there as-is.

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