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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

And does it actually have well tested, well known, reliable functionality on everything you tend to use? Configuration of programs using easy to edit text files vs some system of ticking checkboxes in a GUI?

RegEdit, is there a text version for that? Imo there's no comparison to the Linux ecosystem.

Windows is GUI first.

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> RegEdit, is there a text version for that?

Uhm, in Powershell:

    PS C:\Users\zb3> cd hklm:
    PS HKLM:\>

(you are now in the registry local machine hive)

It's just that I have a hard time believing that three or four years of development for administrating windows through text is equivalent to 30 years development for administrating Unix through a CLI.

PowerShell has been around since 2006, not just the past 3 or 4 years. And there was a good deal of CLI-based administration / scripting before then, too.

The default fallback to can't find it in GUI is cmd? Windows 95 used to start from command prompt. We've been administering windows from cli for 30 years. But our cli was oo from the start. Powershell is really amazing. Once you start falling out of object land into crap like ssh, you see the split, e.g. why it took so God damn long to port it. And I still have plink into switches using a premade command file.

In many ways it's much better. There is a consistent interface over everything. Whereas on my Unix boxes my ~/.ssh/config file looks completely different to my Apache config.

Also I get much more fine grained control over permissions in the registry, right down to individual keys. Try doing that when your config is in a text file.

And does it actually have well tested, well known, reliable functionality on everything you tend to use?

Yes, MicroSoft made a big thing about this about five or six years ago if I recall correctly. All the server products like Exchange or SQL Server treat PowerShell as a first class client.

You can walk around the registry just as if you are traversing a directory tree.

If anything the GUI is becoming rather dumbed down in recent releases.

> RegEdit, is there a text version for that?

AFAIK, yes, it's at %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe

So it exists, but is the usability and functionality nearly equivalent? And the thing is that it also involves third-party software tools.

Nearly equivalent to what? It can do everything that the GUI can, if that's what you mean. Some things are obviously going to be less convenient, but that's just the nature of CLI.

And what third party tools does that involve?

What I mean is that oftentimes on Windows, I use non-OS tools or applications which are not made with the expectation that you will want to script them or configure them via text interface.

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