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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Why would you even want to make Windows command line better, instead of using a state of the art command line of Linux via a VM running in Windows, if you really cannot escape the Windows realm ?

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Because a VM is overkill and won't allow you to interact with the Windows host.

Windows used to provide Interix which was a subsystem that allowed use to use quite a bunch of posix utilities and offered quite a very good integration with Windows. You could do quite a lot of things with it (we used it to convert a unix app to windows in record time) and it was IMO superior to Cygwin.

But that was 10 years ago, it disappeared at some point, being integrated somewhere in either the server version or the professional edition (named something like Unix Service for Windows) I lost track.

Considering all the work that MS is putting in interoperability those days, I'm wondering if it will not make a come back at some point.

Good luck with file permissions on the Windows host. You are in for a fun time.

Because not everyone shares your opinions. I'm not a fan of Powershell, but one thing I love about the design is that it works on objects, not text. UNIX philosphy relies heavily on text and it keeps some things simple, but when you need to move beyond that to more complex structure, the UNIX command-line starts breaking down, whereas Powershell pipes, etc. continue to do well. There are good ideas out there beyond "just use Linux."

If the Linux command line is state of the art, then the art hasn't advanced that far. Too much of it is frozen in time, with constraints from PDP-11s with two-tone 80-char displays, and insane, arcane UI that made sense to the wizards of that day, but less so to we mere mortals. Lots of inertia there.

Still CMD is worse, and Powershell is different, but maybe not any better...

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