Microsoft Is Making the Windows Command Line a Lot Better (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the last few years, Microsoft has been working to improve the Windows console. Console windows now maximize properly, for example. In the olden days, hitting maximize would make the window taller but not wider. Today, the action will fill the whole screen, just like any other window. Especially motivated by the Windows subsystem for Linux, the console in Windows 10 supports 16 million colors and VT escape sequences, enabling much richer console output than has traditionally been possible on Windows.

Microsoft is working to build a better console for Windows, one that we hope will open the door to the same flexibility and capabilities that Unix users have enjoyed for more than 40 years. The APIs seem to be in the latest Windows 10 Insider builds, though documentation is a little scarce for now. The command-line team is publishing a series of blog posts describing the history of the Windows command-line, and how the operating system's console works. The big reveal of the new API is coming soon, and with this, Windows should finally be able to have reliable, effective tabbed consoles, with emoji support, rich Unicode, and all the other things that the Windows console doesn't do... yet.

Comments

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT YEAR IS IT?!?!

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[Anonymous Coward]

You should really look into PowerShell, doubly so on Server.

Microsoft has something called the Common Engineering Criteria which lays out a set of requirements in order to ship something... as far back as 2011 (I think) there was a requirement that any administrative action you can do with the UI, there must be a cmdline option, with heavy emphasis on PowerShell. The exclusion to this is for pre-existing UI. Add/change a feature, cmdline equivalent is required, leave an older thing untouched in next release, it doesn't require touching.

Of course half of the exposed options were just WMI endpoints, which can be tweaked via PS even if no official cmdlets were created.

Source: Former MS employee.

Re:can I fireup putty and login to an windows serv

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been able to do it through SSH for a year or so. You've been able to do it with PowerShell for quite a while now (a decade?).

Re:Did they buy JPSoft?

[malxau]

I've been working on a free alternative (see http://www.malsmith.net/yori/). I won't be able to replicate all of bash, but there's plenty of nice things that can be incorporated into a native Windows shell, and it's sure keeping me busy.

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[Daltorak]

Next I would like to see Microsoft make CLI versions of all the traditional windows management tools, and then for legacy GUI tools

Your wish has been granted.... like.... nine years ago. Where've you been, dude and/or dudette? As a random example: Microsoft added Managed Service Accounts in 2008 R2, and you can see a "Managed Service Accounts" folder in AD Users and Computers, but you cannot create or edit them there. You -must- do it through Powershell using New-ADServiceAccount. Here's a blog post from 2009 on the subject.

Pretty much the only parts of Windows you can't configure through the command prompt, are some of the GUI elements. For example, there is no way to change what is pinned to the taskbar, nor can you programmatically set whether a tray icon will always be visible or not. Folks at Microsoft have said that this limitation is intended to protect the user from app installers that inject themselves all over the place. Setting crucial visual things like display resolution is also disallowed (except on Server Core, where there is no GUI to do this).

Re: As usual, they are decades late

[FaxeTheCat]

MacOS became Unix with MacOS X. Up to and including version 9 it was not Unix.

Re:Did they buy JPSoft?

[phantomfive]

when they could learn Powershell instead? Powershell has full Intellisense nowadays, access to the full .NET Framework library, comprehensive built-in documentation, and thousands of commands that can reach into every part of the system.

Powershell redirect < doesn't work and redirect > can corrupt your files. Furthermore creating new CLI programs that integrate into the Powershell system is a pain. Powershell is great for administering Windows tools, but other than that, it's kind of crap.

Powershell is not Bash

[aberglas]

What more needs to be said. It is ... different.

Unix shell works on strings. Powershell works on objects. That is an important difference. Especially if the strings have funny characters in them.

As to speed, it is .net, so I presume compiles down to machine code.

Re:Powershell is not Bash

[PmanAce]

PowerShell is not a compiled Language. It doesn't produce IL directly either.

So think of it like an interpreted language that just happens to live in a Dotnet Ecosystem which allows it to instantiate and interact with DOTNET objects thus making it seem like a "DOTNET language". PowerShell has its own Extended Type System (ETS) that makes it more dynamic.. You can create objects on the fly with whatever properties you want, or take an existing dotnet object, and add stuff to it. PowerShell is a dynamic language. With dynamic scoping. It is a pipeline centric language, which passes rich objects through the pipeline (in contrast to binary/text pipelines in unix) PowerShell is a command (verb and noun) centric language in philosophy and implementation, and though it is a RICH Object language, i wouldn't say its object ORIENTATED. you can interact with objects, and create them, but the goal is to produce task based COMMANDS PowerShell lives in different environments. It is a line by line REPL Command line interpreter, but it is also a full scripting engine that can be embedded in other applications.

https://stackoverflow.com/ques...

Re:So why is Microsoft doing this?

[f3rret]

They're doing it because MS is moving towards GUI less servers, current editions of Windows Server 2016 are "core" by standard, which means they don't install any GUI components.