Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

Windows has had a proper shell for a while now, in the form of PowerShell. It's quite different from the standard Unix shell, and I'm nowhere near as productive in it as I am in Bash, but that's more a function of lack of familiarity than any weaknesses of the shell. In fact, I'd say that it's actually much nicer than unix-y shells for a wide variety of tasks.

All I really find missing these days is good line-editing, and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

View on HN

> All I really find missing these days is good line-editing

Probably familiar enough for bash people:

https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

> and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

Not a terminal emulator (although I think it can do Terminal escape sequences if needed):

https://github.com/Maximus5/ConEmu

It's still not a terminal emulator, but you can use Clink [1] to get readline in cmd. Works great with ConEmu or as part of cmder, as others have mentioned.

[1]: http://mridgers.github.io/clink/

Very high ROI. Removes a lot of stress you got just typing cmd.exe.

I knew about ConEmu (though I'm not 100% happy with it either). I'll take a look at PSReadLine, thanks.

However great powershell is, the fact that bash is so universal everywhere else makes it too hard for me to use. With Cygwin I can often move seamlessly between Linux, OSX and Windows without changing anything I do, including all the utility scripts I write etc.

> and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

On Cygwin, try MinTTY. The default cmd.exe console is horrendous. This is derived from PuTTY and much, much nicer.

You can even use MinTTY with cmd.exe (and probably powershell) for dramatically improved user experience.

And, you can also find MinTTY standalone separate from the burden of cygwin. I got it from the msys project.

> It's quite different from the standard Unix shell

And that's the issue. Most people don't want to relearn everything, and I don't see why MS had to reinvent the wheel.

Do you know how to echo text in ASCII or UTF-8? > "text" or > echo "text" For me both come out with weird character encoding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com