Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Windows PowerShell

I have played a bit around with the Windows PowerShell but is now going back to the DOS command line. What I was looking for was something like Linux bash for Windows. PowerShell is not that and in my opinion it sucks.

Here are some problems
  • It has a history but works nowhere nearly as well on bash. For instance it does not save the history automatically.
  • The terminal is still lousy with respect to copy and paste.
  • If you C program sends a lot of output to the terminal then t is so slow.
  • If you press ctrl break then it closes down the whole console. That is not what the DOS command does and hence the close down too frequently.
So a good advice is. If you are looking for a replacement for Linux bash then do not waste time on Windows PowerShell. Maybe the Hotwire Shell (http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/) is worth looking at. Let me know if you a better suggestion.

4 comments:

  1. I used it a bit long time ago but did not like it so much. Also it was not Windows 64 bit friendly but my knowledge is not up to date.

    I have strated using Console (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/) and
    and pycmd (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/). They works quit well. pycmd gives
    you histray that survives logouts etc.

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  2. I have used Console and pycmd for a long time now. They are not perfect but works much better than the standard DOS shell.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's true the Windows console window user experience is awful -- it's the same console we've been using since Windows 95. The shell, on the other hand, is awesome.

    The rest of your complaints are nit-picky in the extreme, but *all* of your complaints can be resolved by switching to a better PowerShell "host" (Console): PowerShell Plus, PowerGUI, PowerShell ISE (which comes with PowerShell), PoshConsole ... lots of options out there.

    ReplyDelete

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