Why is no one putting in any time to replace the Windows shell (cmd.exe)? The stock offering is abysmal and Cygwin isn't much better. We could really use something with a bit of panache like this... Hmmm..
You can do stuff like
ps | ? { $_.Name -match "iexplore" } | % { $_.Kill() }
Console2 puts a nice face on things and supports tabbing and resizing, as you would expect from a usable terminal window.
I was working with this configuration for some time and it is really nice if you're satisfied with life inside MS's walled garden. The problem is that there is absolutely no interoperability with standard *nix tools. What's worse, PowerShell pretends that there is - `ps` in your example is just an alias for 'Get-Process' cmdlet, the same is true for cat, ls and other things.
Aside from that PowerShell is really solid shell. You can extend it with C# code and you get access to many .NET feature both in the command prompt and from PowerShell scripts. The scripts are quite nice for a shell scripts, it offers a few built-in data structures like arrays and hashes, there is a quite good autocompletion, even for .NET classes and objects and so on.
Thinking back on it I'm not terribly surprised this happened given what Console2 is.
- msys-git (I have ls, rm -rf... all unix goodness)
- clink (better tab completion, history, all around good stuff)
- console2 (styling)
- ansicolor (colored prompt)
and also I got some usefull aliases. If you are interested I can write down some steps for other people to follow.
screenshot http://i.imgur.com/hATwCVI.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
It's actually got some quite interesting concepts, and is extremely consistent. These tips also convey the approach and how it works:
Every command is of the form Verb-Noun. Which means you can get off the ground really quickly, as there are only about 15 different verbs. This means you can often guess what you want, even for commands you've never used. Still can't find what you want? Then you can use wildcard searching on the Get-Command command, which returns all matching commands!
The icing on the cake for me is the consistency between interacting with different data sets. For example, New-Item is a command for creating a new item (duh!). The great thing about this however is that this command can be used to create files, registry entries, websites in IIS. This works by allowing you to browse all these things just as you would a file system. e.g. you can "cd" into IIS and treat it just like you would files on disk.
Really an eye opener into what a modern shell should be like
Sounds quite a lot like VMS' DCL, which is similarly intuitive, albeit overly verbose at times.
If you dislike using it directly through cmd.exe due to the abysmal UI (as I do), there's alternatives that let you use it with putty[2] and leave cmd.exe interface all together.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573623/powershell-vs-unix...
Linux is much faster, primarily down to how reliant the Unix way is on forking and how much work Cygwin need to do to emulate that on Windows, but it's only noticeable when working with a lot of data that spawns O(n) processes.
Such scripts can often be rewritten as shell pipelines that don't scale in the same way. E.g. instead of running grep once per file, do xargs grep and filter by filename prefix if necessary; or instead of running mv once per file for renaming multiple files, convert to equivalent CMD syntax and output to a temporary batch file, and run the batch file.
I've got a number of scripts like these, implemented once for the Unix way, and again for Cygwin. But they don't come up all that often, and I haven't had to write one in years.
EDIT: I meant mintty .. it is small, pretty and configurable.
[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandP...
You seem to be confusing terminals (programs that provide a text environment) and shells (usually text-based, often run inside a terminal). Mintty is a terminal. cmd.exe is a shell, but will spawn Windows' own ANSI terminal when asked. Cygwin's bash will also spawn Windows' own terminal when run without one. Fish is a shell, and needs to be run inside a terminal.
Console2 is different again. As I understand it, it wraps Windows' terminal, providing some extra features.
If you install the Powershell Community Extensions (PSCX), a pretty useful Powershell module in general, it has a command (Invoke-BatchFile) to execute a batch file and propagate the environment changes back to powershell. (While this is not always sufficient; I have found it to be enough for most purposes)
It has tab autocompletion. You can send commands directly to the underlying system shell with '!' (e.g., !dir) and save the result in a Python variable for manipulation (a = !dir). It has special commands called "magics" that let you do neat stuff that the standard shell doesn't, like time how long things take to run. It has a robust command history.
What this means is you can write Python code as your shell scripting language.
Perhaps to be files all the way up is a limitation of the bazaar - at least until one hits the JVM, hopefully. There's no contract assuring that level of abstraction between the user and the turtles. And agreement that such a layer of abstraction is a good thing is unlikely to be forthcoming.