Windows to Have Better CLI

MickyJ writes "The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. 'It will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years', so says Bob Muglia, a Senior VP at Microsoft." More from the Tom's Hardware article: "The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."

Comments

Those who do not understand UNIX....

[caluml]

Isn't this just a case of: "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly". -- Henry Spencer.
Soon they'll be storing config in files, and have a CLI only version of their server.

Re:I refuse to use it!

[jellomizer]

Bla Bla Bla waste resources. Did you ever look at the system monitor and see what the difference in resources are if you have a transperant window is?
I havent seen any difference. Transparent shells are acutally quite usefull. When I am reading documents on how to install a program I never installed before I usually have the webpage open and when I am typing in the text I can see the Website threw the shell and make sure I am typing it in correctly. (because I am a bad speller it is usefull) also it is quicker to type then cut and paist a lot of the time. espectilly when you need options that may be on the screen but not part of the example.

Re:It's about time

[selderrr]

what I find the strangest, it that they need so much time to develop it... they have such a pile of cash, and have used it before to pump out software at breakneck speeds (and actually break their neck as with internet explorer) to crush competitors. The fact that this CLI will take so long to develop means that either they don't take it seriously and won't invest big bucks, or means that they take it very seriously and don't want to screw it up again. but even in the last case : the proposed planning is a very careful one

random current cmd gripes

[kisrael]

There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:

1. The tab completion behavior (the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion). A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.

2. up arrow behavior. It took me a while to finally "get" the logic of Windows...if you type command A, then command B, then command C, then arrow back up to B and run that, pressing down will then take you to C and up will take you to A. I think that it's meant to cover a long sequence of commands that you do over and over, so you don't have to keep uparrowing, but just pressing down once per repeated command, but its much harder to keep a mental model of.

Both of these things are classic Window's trade off of predictability for perceived "user friendliness". I think hackers often prefer predicitability and ease of mental modeling, since they can always make it easier by some scripting or whatever.

On the other hand, I like that I can add "\.." to the end of a filename and get to its directory. That's something that seems logical to me that Unix shells don't generally do.

Re:random current cmd gripes

[Tim C]

I would suggest that the reason you find them unpredictable and counter-intuitive is that you're used to the way your preferred Unix shell does things.

If you liken up-arrowing in the command history to up-arrowing in a text file, if you make an edit in the file, your cursor doesn't magically fly down to the bottom of the file, it stays where it is. That, I suspect, is the reasoning behind the Windows command shell's behaviour - it stays where you left it. Think of it as editing the list of executed commands.

Re:Nice, but not earthshattering

[/ASCII]

I've written a Unix shell that aims to have a lower learning curve than traditional shells. It does this by having a smaller and simpler syntax, and integrated help features.

There is an article about the shell here, and the shells homepage is here.

Re:ooooh

[dysprosia]

Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects

This is trivial to implement with a programming language that supports serialization, esp. if it can serialize to stdin/stdout.. In Objective-C, it's a simple matter of objc_open_typed_stream(stdin, OBJC_READONLY); and objc_open_typed_stream(stdout, OBJC_WRITEONLY); and read:'ing and write:'ing to the stream.

Re:vaporware

[ssj_195]

Why should you be worried?

Because there are a surprisingly large contingent of people who define themselves by the operating system they use, and whose self-esteem is directly linked to the perceived superiority of this operating system over Microsoft Windows. During the late nineties, when Windows was truly a buggy, crashy, piece of shit, these people positively basked in the glee that came from the vindication of their chosen OS - back then, Linux truly was light-years ahead of Windows in terms of speed and stability, and geeks rejoiced in the streets.

Flash-forward to Windows 2000/ XP, and Microsoft apparently accomplished a miracle, producing a version of Windows that would literally run and run, and was still fairly nippy. Meanwhile, the writers of Linux Desktop Environments were discovering that it's very easy to be fast and light when you don't do much, or aren't particularly user-friendly, and that increased functionality almost always comes at the price of bloat.

So these people saw two pillars of the superiority of Linux (speed and stability) snatched away from them. The truly curious thing is what happened next: instead of being spurred into action by this new competition and addressing these concerns on the Linux side, these people instead simply went into a state of denial, and refused to let go of these cherished (and rapidly shrinking) areas where Linux once scored over Windows. Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!)) - as a passionate believer in F/OSS, it really grieves me to see people behaving like this, rather than aiming to improve Linux to the state where it once again has many advantages over Windows.

Flash-forward to now, as one of the other areas in which Linux scores over Windows (a UNIX command-line is an awesome and enjoyable tool to use; the Windows command line, by contrast, is a rubber hammer with nails in the handle :)) may well be snatched away, and we see the same thing: people are hoping against hope that Microsoft foul it up, because if they don't another area of Linux superiority disappears, along with another shred of their self-esteem. This, I think, is why people care, and why they do not wish Microsoft well in this project, however helpful it may be to the common good.

Magical Microsoft Moments

[ArsenneLupin]

No story about Microsoft and Unixy shells is complete without the following anecdote:

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MMS (Mortise Money Systems) windowing Monad shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MMS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Monad shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of MSH.

The MPM said that the MMS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MMS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the MSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact Peter Monad of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (Peter Monad is the author of the Monad shell)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

Re:Better late than ....

[surprise_audit]

Ah, Multics... Now there was an OS that would be really useful these days. It was possible to define security layers so that you couldn't even access your own files without being in the exact right security access level. It would be really funny watching the FBI trying to extract personal information from a properly configured Multics system, where you don't even know what the security levels are called, let alone have access to them...

Actually

[bmajik]

i saw an early alpha over 2 years ago. I was blown away.

Note that prior to joining MS, i did admin and development work on linux, solaris, irix, and even hp-ux. i know my way around a unix shell pretty well. I started making noise a few years back about how awful cmd.exe is and how we need a real scriptable admin experience. Some people said "go check this out". I was blown away at what they already had.

There are some things about MSH that are really, really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm frustrated that a lot of the early momentum it had seems to have fizzled and its now bogged down in "product development" :/ The early alphas were releasable, imo. Especially compared to cmd.exe, which is squarely awful :)

Apocryphal Story

[Epeeist]

There is an apocryphal story about someone from MKS and an MS flack giving a joint presentation on their UNIX toolkit for Windows.

During the bit about KSH an old guy at the back kept piping up with comments like "that feature wasn't implemented properly" and "that doesn't conform to the specification". Apparently the MS flack expostulated a lot and try to cast doubt on the old guy's qualifications. It was only then that it was pointed to him that the person making the comments was David Korn.

Re:It's about time

[ILikeRed]

Don't forget about your example that Internet Explorer was not originally a Microsoft product:

• They took the code from a project called Mosiac
• They made a deal with a company called Spyglass to use their source code from Mosiac
• The deal was for a small quarterly payment and a big percentage of sales of Internet Explorer
• They screwed both Netscape and their partner Mosiac by giving it away for free - undercutting the competition and avoiding all royalties to Spyglass - putting them out of business also.

So maybe they just could not find any BSD based CLI or naive proprietary company to screw out of a good CLI? You have to admit though - that is quite some business innovation - Bill's pure genius at it's best. I heard Spyglass finally got a few million out of their lawsuit. It just amazes me that people don't remember these things.