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Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating to me how many people there are out there still using cmd on windows and not powershell or even windows terminal

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I switched to Clink several years ago and it's a bit of a game changer for me: https://github.com/mridgers/clink

I tried Terminal but it felt weirdly laggy, although IIRC it was still beta when I tried it so it might have matured a lot. But the readline behaviour in clink is awesome, there's a lot of good muscle memory overlaps for me between how I use Linux.

Most of the time I just want to run some program in some folder in the console to try getting the log output, so I right-click in explorer "open command window here" and just type the program name.

With PS that's ".\program" (~like in bash, two more chars) to make it happy, which is two more characters for no win at all in my use case (anything more complex gets some variant of bash/fish rather than PS, plus Windows Terminal). So I just use regular cmd (and add it back to the explorer context menu since Windows removed the option).

Though 97% of me not using PS in that case is mostly it feeling like yet another thing Microsoft is trying to force on me. But I agree that in that case it's me getting stuck in my old ways and pushing users out of cmd seems to make sense.

The nice thing about needing the extra .\ is great tab completion. If your output folder only generates the one EXE then .\ then Tab is sometimes all you need. For "program.exe" you can save 4 characters (a "gram", if you like). You can even write it as ./ then Tab to save a shift keypress (especially if you have bash habits).

I really miss the old snappy windows console, AFAIK it is no longer accessible on win11. I run semi-scripted actions at work and the new windows terminal has an annoying startup latency.

There are some interesting combinations of Settings. You can have Terminal startup with your Windows login and always running in the background, which is essentially why the old consoles were so "snappy", the classic ConHost was always running, even when there are no console windows to display.

If you leave it always running you can also try Win+` for "Quake mode".

cmd is still very powerful and quite sufficient for most tasks. powershell can do so much more but most of the time there isn't a need.

cmd.exe is largely still concerned with starting processes and hooking them together in much the same vein as Bourne shell, so I tend to use it for that.

(I actually use Yori[0], but it's pretty much to tcsh what cmd.exe is to csh.)

PowerShell leaned a little too hard into the structured data to be useful for me as a command shell. It's a pretty decent competitor to the Python REPL though.

0: https://github.com/malxau/yori

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