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Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I've absolutely felt your pain. Some of those things have maybe improved (I use git every day, I love my PowerShell, and Visual Studio + ReSharper is glorious once you tell some of the cruft to stay out of your way) but it's still a long way from perfect.

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It's amazing how many people either dismiss PowerShell out of hand because it's different, or don't even think about it when talking about Windows commandline support. Getting .NET objects returned, rather than piping text around is awesome. So is having an IDE specifically for writing PowerShell scripts. I'm still learning PowerShell, and love bash, but as powerful as bash is, in some ways it feels very primitive in comparison. If PowerShell 15 years old when bash was released, would anyone consider it better than PowerShell?

Powershell did not exist when I was a C# programmer. Not saying it would have made a difference either way, just that I couldn't have mentioned it.

Anyway, I don't think bash/zsh is so great, rather the tools that have grown around them for the last 20 years make them the best available option. Powershell may be nice, but it's got a long road to hoe.

True.

It has a steep learning curve, as one needs to learn a new set of commands, but once you start getting it, it is great.

I just have two complaints with it: - the stupid ps1 extension; - commands are verbose when comparing with other shells

Agreed that PowerShell really does make command line work on Windows much more pleasant than the old DOS prompt. I just discovered a PowerShell module for working with Git (https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git). It shows status info right in your prompt line and does tab completion of git commands and branches.

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