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

Powershell is powerfull

[Camel Pilot]

But way too verbose and complex... sorta like a java version of bash.

Re:what

[DickBreath]

Emojis are simply a side effect of supporting Unicode characters -- at long last.

Now Windows Console will support foreign languages.

With bigger and bigger Unicode character sets, every font will not only have emojis, and various human languages, it could also eventually have a set of font glyphs for every possible 8x8 cell grid. (That's only 2^64 characters extra in each font!) Then you could use these font characters to display text and graphics like it is 1980 again! That would make Windows Console great (again).

I still won't use Windows 10

[Joshs922]

As long as it continues to be a SaaS spyware product with forced updates/upgrades, and has an onerous, unacceptable privacy policy that claims the right to access all of my personal data, I don't care if they make it nicer than my favorite desktop Linux distro. I'll never use it.

Re:what

[Desler]

So it can do things that Slashdot still can't. The irony will probably be lost on the people acting smug over this being "late".

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[Anonymous Coward]

powershell has some of the worse syntax I've ever seen in scripting. Way too much punctuation, object name lengths are too long, oh, and it's slow as fuck.

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[jlowery]

Amen, Brother. How on earth do they let such bad ideas percolate to the end user? I still haven't forgiven them for The Registry: want to change an operating system setting? Just remember this simple GUID: 229G-A17B-CC2E-82DD-E1AF-...

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[Dutch Gun]

I'm a largely GUI-centric dev on Windows, but I think that's because Windows tends to work that way, and consequently has a lot of really nice GUI-based tools. For instance, there are nice GitHub desktop clients for Mac and Windows. But as for Linux? Nope - command-line only. So, when I work in Linux, I just sort of assume I have to keep various terminal windows open all the time, and that I'll probably be writing more scripts than when using Windows or Mac. It's just sort of the way things are done.

I'm comfortable working either way. However, I will say that I vastly prefer Bash to Powershell for CLI scripting. Bash is simple and fairly easy to pick up, if a bit on the clunky side. Powershell feels a bit over-engineered and overly-complex even when doing fairly simple things, and I've never bothered investing the time to really understand it all that deeply. So, I'm very happy about Linux tools, including Bash and various other CLI utilities, being ported to Windows. Because no matter how complete a GUI-based solution you have, there are almost always going to be times when you need to drop back to CLI tools if you're doing something outside of the GUI tool's expectations.

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[DamnOregonian]

I thought I was a reasonably intelligent human until I encountered PowerShell. 5 minutes with it, and I feel retarded. I haven't determined if it's because I'm too stupid to digest that syntax, if my brain cells are forcefully refusing to, or they're outright committing ritual suicide.

Re:As usual, they are decades late

[sjames]

The big caviat though is I'll bet a CLI guy has a better chance of success when GUI is the right tool than a GUI guy does if CLI is the right (or only) tool.

Learning CLI is well worth it.