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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.
why does a text console need emoji support?
can I fireup putty and login to an windows server? or wait will I need to buy server 2019 to get this server side?
The best way to make CMD livable is to install Take Command. I've been using it since it was called 4DOS back in the pre-Windows days. It has always provided tab filename completion, history, etc (all those nice things in bash) and a much larger command set.
When we take over and kill Linux as a stand-alone OS and make it available only under Windows, at least you'll have a command line window that won't make you cry -- even though your tears of loss over your silly little free 'open source' OS will still be sweet to us. Mark my words, Slashdotters, Miscreant-o-soft has had Linux in it's sights for a while now. Don't say you weren't warned when they lock it out of booting on your hardware.
See, the UNIX paradigm has been something that Microsoft has never been able to swallow. Keep it simple. That's it. That's why all the UNIX commands we know and love have survived through the years, they are simple. They get the job done.
Stuff has been added, sure, but most of the original shell and common system commands have remained the same, decades on. Some 50 years of sameness and simplicity that Microsoft will never understand.
In all my dealings with Microsoft software, they seem to strive to make things as complicated and insane as possible. Even this new powershell, the commands are needlessly long, with long parameters names and very strict syntax. And not to be outdone, a whole new spam of technobabble error messages. Their APIs and programming languages are the same way, sure they are pretty powerful, but the complexity, nothing is simple. Simple isn't something Microsoft does. So they'll never be able to ever be 'unix' like.