Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.