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Take Command Console - TCC/LE
https://jpsoft.com/comparison-...

Since the times of 4DOS/4NT microsoft command console has been uncompetitive

Even for scripting: is much more lighter and easier to use sax basic from command console than powershell bloadware

Out of curiosity, have you ever opened powershell and started issuing dos/cmd commands?

Yes.

Personally, I don't use either PowerShell or command shell, much preferring JPSoft's far superior Take Command to both of them. However, when I have had to use PowerShell, I've often used the "help" command, which is markedly different from the command shell's.

In PowerShell, type "help" and then type "cmd /c help" and see the difference. For those who rarely use the command shell, switching to PowerShell will not make life simpler.

--The nice thing is, he's still in business for Windows:

Look for "TCC/LE"

https://jpsoft.com/

--I started with Norton Utilities NDOS, found 4DOS, and now have TCC/LE installed everywhere ;-)

> The shell still sort of sucks (powershell). I wish someone would write a 'native' shell for windows that was cool. I'd event settle for a dos prompt you can resize like an xterm.

--Ever heard of 4dos? Check this one out:

http://jpsoft.com/

--No affiliation, just satisfied user. 1st ran into it back in the 90's when Norton Utilities bundled Ndos. The TCC/LE version is free.

If you aren't afraid of the command line, then you can do this on Windows, too.

Using the "win" command in NirCmd, you can screw around with window sizes and placement. The "window" command of the for-pay software Take Command can do this as well. There are also ways to manipulate windows in Powershell.

--Check out jpsoft and see if Take Command has the feature(s) you want/remember... The author also takes enhancement requests

http://jpsoft.com/

/ They have a free version

--Ever heard of 4DOS? They updated the product for Windows as a CMD replacement:

http://jpsoft.com/index.php

I use the free version, but I'm really happy with it. I'm more of a Linux guy these days, or I would prolly pay for the full version.

> #4 A good command prompt

Since a few years hago there is a gratis version of the "Take Command" replacement for microsoft command prompt http://jpsoft.com/tccle-cmd-replacement.html

Or if you like to walz with elephants you can use microsoft PowerShell/Monad

And, if you were using NDOS from Norton Utilities, then you were using 4DOS. Try it out at <URL:ftp://ftp.jpsoft.com/4dos/>.

The LIST command in JP Software's command processors will do almost what you want, except that it also uses the windows FileOpen dialog if called with no arguments. The listing is displayed in the console window however. Hex mode is 'X' and exit is ^C if you had wildcards or multiple file names on the command line, or just ESC until you run out of files.

The LIST command in JP Software's command processors will do almost what you want, except that it also uses the windows FileOpen dialog if called with no arguments. The listing is displayed in the console window however. Hex mode is 'X' and exit is ^C if you had wildcards or multiple file names on the command line, or just ESC until you run out of files.

If you like old DOS commands, probably you'll like Take Command Console from jpsoft. It's a basic and free command processsor derived from 4NT and 4DOS command processor. It comes with with 111 commands, 140 functions and 97 internal variables that allows you to do several tasks with basic batch commands, including IF-Then-Else, DO Loops, Switch, subroutines and enhanced options for shell commands like copy, move, delete. It also supports ANSI color commands.

I haven't used it for ages... but it worked very well..

http://www.jpsoft.com/

4dos turned into 4NT, which evolved into TC, and it's still going. There's even a free lite version now.

Ooh, that reminds me, I think I need to renew my service contract.

http://jpsoft.com/

http://jpsoft.com/

TC if you want the alternative shell also, TC LE if you just want the console wrapper. I've got it set up with TCC, CMD, Python 2.5, 2.6, 3k, PowerShell, and msys/mingw bash; everything works.

WHAT command prompt?

JP Software's TCC/LE (or "The Console App Formerly Known As 4NT"). Fortunately, their software is much better than their web design.

You can always use "bash", which comes with Cygwin. The latest Cygwin installs an icon in your start menu that gets you a bash prompt.

Personally, though, I use 4NT. Although it isn't directly available anymore, Take Command Console/LE from the same company is close to the last version of 4NT, and free (as in beer).

One of my favorite current command lines is:
sort < clip: > clip:
This sorts whatever is on the Windows clipboard essentially "in place".

I once wrote a shareware app. The shareware version just had a nag screen when you started the program and some minor functionality disabled. If you registered my program, you got a registration code which you entered along with your name. All the code was a simple hash of the name that resulted in about 5 or 6 digits (no 42 digit hex numbers here). When registering, the program would store the name and checksum in its .INI file.

I didn't care how many computers you installed on, or even how many people were using it concurrently. In fact, you could just copy the .INI file to another computer and it would work just fine. I think my help file even had instructions for doing just this.

All of this was trivially hackable, and there was nothing preventing someone from distributing the program with an already registered .INI file. The trick was, the name and checksum "branded" your copy. All of the window titles included your name in them, so if you redistributed it, the "registered" copies would also have your name in them.

This actually worked pretty well. I got plenty of registrations, even though the registration process was only check or money order and snail-mail (before the internet thingie was invented by Al Gore)

It still works. The best selling game of all time, Doom2, was released with no DRM. JP Software has been selling replacement Windows shells for 15 years using the same branding method. And you can download the latest enterprise edition of Oracle for any platform without any restrictions whatsoever. And Oracle isn't cheap.

Whenever I recommend software to clients, any crappy licensing DRM scheme that I might have to deal with later results in automatic disqualification.

I don't even have to type the CD part. I just type windows\ and hit enter.

Try this: http://www.jpsoft.com/ . Make sure to enable "fuzzy CD".

Apple is the grand daddy of "do what we say, and how we say to do it" mentality.

In Germany we say "Wenn zwei das gleiche tuen ist es noch lange nicht das gleiche" - translated: "If two do the same it is still not the same". I use Vista at Work and Mac OS X at home and I have never felt so patronized by an operating system as with Vista.

And the user access control thing is probably the best example: Bot OSs use elevation but on Vista it drives me insane. Probably because I see the elevation Dialog on OS X once of twice a week and on Vista 5 to 10 times a day. And only that few times because I permanently have a file-manager / command-line combo started with admin rights (TakeCommand - http://www.jpsoft.com/ - would not know what to do without).

Reminds me of the good old linux days when I had a root command line open all time.

But back to the point: For me as a customer the question is not how much I am patronized - the question is how much do I feel patronized.

Well I use 4NT so I guess I am one of the guys you never needs cmd.exe that you are talking about.

http://www.jpsoft.com/

This is quick 4NT batchfile psueudo array routine. But I don't think I am the average Windows user. Could I handle Bash, uh duh. Why would I want to? when I have TONS more flexibility with Windows. If I really need Linux I can always fire it up in VMWare

---------4nt batchfile sample
setlocal

do l = 1 to 3
    set store%l=%@eval[%l+10]
enddo

set store*

do x = 1 to 3
    echo %[store%x]
enddo

A short cut to start the command prompt makes it "great" - is that really all what got improved.

Well, for me it takes more to a great command prompt - but then I use 4NT ever since MS-Dos 3.11 (at that time called 4Dos or NDos). Have a look for your self of what a great command prompt can do for you:

http://www.jpsoft.com/

Martin

Subversion is for stupid and ugly people, just ask Linus. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/0 6/03/004214
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

If you must over think this problem for non-computer literate users, at least use GIT.

Personally, I use the built-in `copy` that 4NT provides with an update switch. http://www.jpsoft.com/4ntdes.htm I suppose xcopy or xxcopy are also options.

"For two decades I've hated the command prompt in DOS and Windows."

http://www.jpsoft.com/

I find it VERY difficult to believe that someone that claims to have 20 years of experience with DOS and Windows at the command line could not know about their products. At one point, a version of 4DOS was bundled with Norton Utilities (called NDOS, as I recall).

"The fallback on a Microsoft box has been running a Unix shell under Cygwin or installing Microsoft's own Services for Unix (or its predecessor, Softway's Interix)"

Yeah, if you spent the past 20 years blithely ignoring native software development on the PC platform.

Sounds to me like the submitter has been waiting 20 years for Microsoft to natively implement Bash under Windows to his satisfaction, and thinks PowerShell is it.

Or, he's just astroturfing, which seems far more likely.

Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system.

Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.

Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.

Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.

Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.

Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx.
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."

I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than

Way back in the day when I used 4DOS it was the prefered command interpreter for my friends and I rather than command.com... :) This had tons of features including the TAB feature. http://www.4dos.info/h4dos.htm has the old docs from JPSoft's website. I haven't used it, but here's the 4NT program info link for reference too - http://www.jpsoft.com/4ntdes.htm I forget when I stopped using 4DOS, but it was a cool program to use while it lasted. It's been a long time -- when I used to bother modifying the dos prompt with colors too cuz I was so 1337. :P

http://www.jpsoft.com

I've had aliases, tab-completion, and much more ... since the 1980s I believe. Objects are nice, but I never use cmd.exe anyway!

* WinRAR. Yup, Windows doesn't ship with a decent compression tool.

Depends on your definition of "decent", of course. Windows since XP (and perhaps 2000? I don't quite recall) can open ZIP files from explorer without a third-party app. Sure, it won't open RAR, but then neither does WinZip, gzip, bzip, etc.

* PuTTY. No SSH included either.

Agree. PuTTY is teh awesome.

* Cygwin. Basics command environment, for working with the rest of your tools in a normal way.

Meh. Learn that Windows != Unix and you'll do fine. The cmd.exe environment may not be the most powerful, but it works in its own way. Think of it like tcsh for *nix. You may not really want to use it as your shell or for scripting, but you could if you had to. You may also consider 4NT or Monad/MSH. If you're suggesting Cygwin for scripting purposes, that just shows you know nothing about Windows. Scripting in Windows is just as powerful as in *nix, if not moreso, but you're going to have to get comfortable with jscript or vbscript and COM/ActiveX.

* TightVNC. Windows is not network aware out of the box.

Bullshit. First off, "not network aware" is the wrong way to describe this problem. Second, Terminal Server is built into Windows. You may have to turn it on (or jump through some hoops to turn it on, as in XP Home or MCE), but it's there. (In fact, it can't not be there, as XP's Fast User Switching is based on it, and any time you log into a WinXP or Win2K3 machine you're actually on a terminal server session that just happens to be local.) VNC is nice, but RDP is quite a bit better (unless you're working over dial-up, in which case VNC sucks but just not as bad).

* Daemon tools. Much like MacOS, Windows doesn't have a good loopback tool. Daemon tools fixes this.

And it also breaks quite a few games, especially those using StarForce. DRM and copy protection sucks, and StarForce is the worst of the bunch, but it's the price you pay if you want to play games.

* iTunes. Yes, I install it on all Windows installations :)

Because nothing says "Windows" like a badly written, poorly-ported Mac program :). Honestly, I'd rather use Windows Media Player or Winamp than iTunes. But then, I don't have an iPod either, so I'm not forced into using iTunes.

* Azureus. How else do you download files nowadays?

One of the better BitTorrent clients. Good UPnP integration, too. Not really a Windows app, though, as it's all Java/SWT.

* FireFox. IE is not an option.

Meh again. FireFox is nice, IE isn't nearly as bad as you seem to believe (0-day exploits aside, anyway, which you'd never run into if you were a little careful in your browsing). IE7 is getting much better, as well. Competition is good, zealotry isn't.

You might want to take a look at JP Software's 4NT and Take Command products here, and then combine it with the Windows ports of many GNU tools that can be found here. Between the two, you can do pretty much everything that you can do in BASH and then some, the only drawbacks being that it's not portable and pipes on Windows *still can't be parallelised. There is a port of csh for Windows knocking about too, but aside from a general lack of stability in the version I tried some time ago, csh seems to have far more portability issues than the other *NIX shells.

Depends upon the expertise of the people that are going to write and maintain this. I would personally go one of two routes: JPSoft's 4NT, or else Python.

4NT is an enhanced Windows batch language, with features to do things like write / read INI files, control loops, and most of the things needed for "real" programming. It's very mature (I first used it when a 386SX was a relatively mainstream machine), and it's easy to pull information from the OS with it, as well as interact with individual program windows. Check http://www.jpsoft.com/ for further details; at $70 it's pretty cheap, and about 5 times faster than normal Windows CMD batch language.

The other alternative is Python; it's more powerful, and allows you to call C libraries if you really need heavy lifting. It's more sophisticated, and still relatively legible.

I've used both to write automation routines in a hospital environment, and I can say both are very reliable and robust. Make your choice based upon the expertise of who will maintain the scripts - JPSoft's product for those more comfortable with Windows batch style languages, Python for more programmer types. For people who would not have a clue for either one, go Python.

Don't worry. If it's ever finished and shipped, JPSoft will have a usable replacement for it too, as they've done with every previous MS shell.

http://www.jpsoft.com/

4NT has been available for many years (even back to the DOS days as 4DOS) and is an excellent shell both interactively and for scripting. To mention only Cygwin shows the UNIX tunnel vision pervasive on /.

Yup, five years. So what I'm lead to wonder is which we'll see first:

1) A good command line for Windows
2) A good GUI for Linux

Both have been available for many years.

Good command line for NT.

For GUIs on Linux, take your pick, there are tons of them. Unless your definition of 'good' requires that one must somehow kill off the others, in which case there will never be one, thankfully.

I've used 4NT for so long now it's hard to remember what the standard shell can and can't (or couldn't) do. Although looking through the 4NT help, I can't see any support for named pipes there either, just regular unnamed pipes.

Gee, maybe if you don't like a command-line interface, you can run another. Like JPSoft's 4NT. It's far more useful to me than any unix command-line ever has. But it takes a few years to grow into it.

Combined with cygwin I can do most things that unix users can do, but every unix user I have ever met cannot do all of the things that I do.

Have you tried 4NT

Page-up/down for directory history is worth it alone.

--
Tobacco represents a huge tax base for the government. The government is as addicted to the revenue from smokers as the smokers are to the cigarettes.
- WetKarma (plastic.com)

You're looking for a system on a chip, but you want to use bash?! Uh... you might want to consider re-weighing your priorities there: bash is huge, over 460KB on my personal system. You might also want to try looking into 4DOS.

You can do dozens, literally dozens, of things with batch files!

Only partially joking, though, as batch files using 4DOS/4NT are really quite powerful.

1. 4NT - I am old enough to use the command line.
2. Visual Slickedit - my editor of choice. I started out with version 4 and I just sent off the money for the upgrade to version 9 yesterday.
3. Subversion - 'cause VCS is a must. The place where I work may not use it but I will.
4. Tortoise SVN - to make my life with a VCS even more easy.
5. Cygwin - mostly for GCC.
6. Linkstash - I think this is a much better way to manage bookmarks
7. Winzip - the latest version. And yes, I've paid for it.
8. Object Desktop - I've gotten addicted to Object Bar and Object Edit. No, I'm not into skinning...
9. OE-QuoteFix - makes Outlook Express a bearable newsreader.
10. ev41 - a free HP-41 emulation for when I need a real calculator. There is a Pocket PC version too.

>What are the Windows people missing out on?

For those who love the command line: exactly nothing. Services for Unix is free and supported by the OS vendor, and if you don't like it there's always UnixUtils, 4NT and Cygwin.

I totaly agree with you about the incompletness of man pages for newbies (me).
The most frustrating part of the man pages for me is the lack of practical examples in them. I've always felt that the easiest way to understand a command or concept is by imitation, it's very intuitive. And I'm not talking about an abstract example like :

Foobar [argument] [option] ([sub argument] [output file])

That doesn't speak to me the same way as a realy concrete example of the command, even if it's not exactly the command I need, at least I know the general syntax and can try from there.

I've always found 4DOS / 4NT (for the Windows world) to have the best possible help. Because you have a clear desciption of every optional argument, and lots of examples.

Murphy.

This brings up something I've been wanting to ask: What slick, modern command shells are available for Windows? cmd.exe is crap, of course :) Ideally I'd like something like an OS X (or Linux GUI) terminal window. I've used 4NT, and the related Take Command, but I'm looking for alternatives. Surely there are some?

(Yes, you can run bash under Windows--as part of the Cygwin package--but it still runs in a crappy little console window.)

Does anyone remember 4Dos? Between that and Qmodem, I learned a whole lot about computers.

For a pathetically simple example, I google from the command line. (C:\4NT> google your+mom+is+a+slut .. remember spaces are pluses with GET.)

For a more complicated example, scripts that I have that reference specific files on specific harddrives use environment variables ("%HD25G") so that they function on EVERY computer despite the file being on ONE computer. (This is how I "mchk " a regular expression to see if I have that music, or "vchk " one to see if I have that video, or "# " to get a friend's phone number.

Yes... I can finally admit it. I am a windows user and I love grep. (hangs head in shame)

Back in the day I used DOS, 4DOS (a COMMAND.COM shell replacement) was the number one must-have software.
Simple, small, clean, fast, and with all the features a power user want, even more that you could dream of.
I even prefer its TAB completion over bash.
It was incredibly productive.

JPSoft makes 4UNIX.

If you want a good, powerful, well-supported (you can get your questions answered) shell for Windows right now, check out JP Software's 4NT and Take Command replacement shells.

Control structures, many built in functions (string and file manipulation, some internet communications, ...) and more, with 99% compatibility with CMD.exe, just in case.

I started using it just for nice command history back in 1991 and have stayed with it ever since.

Ever hear of "GNU's Not Unix"? Pretty much all of the core command line tools from "bc" to "zcat" (passing through "find" and "grep" en route) compile, or have versions for Win32. Most of them are in fact available from the site I linked to if you look. I can run nearly all my bash scripts on Win32 without any modification, and in combination with JP Software's 4NT or Take Command can actually as much done on Windows before I have to resort to a more thorough language. The biggest problem with Windows scripting is that pipes are not real-time; each command has to finish before the next stage of the pipe can start.

Let's not forget that JP Software has been producing 4DOS, 4OS2 and 4NT shell replacements since the early 90's.

So it seems that Microsoft is "innovating" again, using the standard Microsoft definition, find good software, reimplement it poorly, and call it innovative.

I'm sorry, but 4NT coupled with the correct ports of whatever unix utilities you use blows the pants of cygwin.

Few will believe me, and I'm sure my karma will be killed by this post, but I gotta be me.

Go to JPSoft.com for more info.
Honestly though, until you develop a good INI, set of aliases, and 4START.BAT, it's not that great. But compared to command.com it is the difference between zsh and sh. Totally.