Comments on: PowerShell NOT inferior to Cygwin

By: Scorpio

Scorpio — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:49:10 +0000

The paradoxical thing(s) about Microsoft PowerShell, is that:

- It has many alias(es) for compatability with Unix & unix like Shell commands, but, it has not backward compatability with MS-DOS commands !!!
If you can recognise commands like deltree, & the old quasi pipes dir/w , dir/p, dir/w/p etc.

- The claim that the noun-verb combination is easier: personally, I do not think it’s typist friendly to type Get-ChildItem vs. just typing ls (it’s good an alias is there)

- It’s much more slower to load than cmd.exe

By: Charles Roper

Charles Roper — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:49:35 +0000

Agreed about the deeply egregious pile of stinking turd that is the Windows command window. There is a saviour, though:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

By: Marcelo Cantos

Marcelo Cantos — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:51:17 +0000

Maybe, maybe not. We often fail to realise how vital a new technology is until long after we become heavily dependent on it (e.g., mobile phones and the internet).

But all the whizzbang goodies in the world won’t help if PowerShell doesn’t assist the transition with some basic essentials. Would mobile phones have taken off if they couldn’t phone home?

I am a big believer in good ol’ text (ASCII, even, though I’ll settle for UTF-8), so for the time being I remain unconvinced that PowerShell is in my future.

By: Andrew Matthews

Andrew Matthews — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:39:48 +0000

That’s a very good set of points. Maybe that was another reason I abandoned powershell?

I can’t help thinking that if you came from a powershell background, you would castigate bash for using a text-only pipeline. ;^}

By: Marcelo Cantos

Marcelo Cantos — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:30:22 +0000

I played with PowerShell for a bit, and hated it almost immediately. A large portion of my loathing is aimed not at PowerShell per se but at the decaying-heap-of-mold console Window it lives in: rectangular selections suck a big one, as does the buffer management approach, and I can’t scroll back through the buffer without the mouse (insanely frustrating). Scrolling is about ten times slower than rxvt (As an aside, I can’t figure out why ls -l */*/* generates five times more lines than dir */*/* from the same directory). PowerShell is totally broken inside rxvt, so I’m guessing ssh is out of the question (ironically, cmd works in both).

Sans a few minor improvements, command editing seems to be stuck in the dark ages. It remains many long years behind bash. No dircolors either!

Is there anything resembling ‘which’? Of course adding cygwin to the path helps: which cmd => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32/cmd … very pretty! Is there anything like history expansions (!$, !*, !!)? What about command substitution (ls -l `which ls`)?

The most egregious omission is the total absence of background jobs (not to mention nohup). I seriously hope I’m wrong on this one.

I’m sure there is a lot of good stuff in PowerShell, but it’s completely useless if I have to throw out almost everything in a shell that makes me productive. This tool has a long, long way to go.