7 ms·

I tried using PowerShell or Hyper. But these are just so slow to start. So I'm always coming back to cmd.exe. It is fast and serves my basic needs just perfect.

• ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Do you have something custom going on in powershell? I’m not a power user of windows shells but it opens very quickly for me. So much so that I never thought about the speed of either terminal.
  • userbinator 8y ago
    "very quickly" is subjective, but compared to cmd it is noticeably slower even in a fresh install of Windows --- the few times I'm forced to actually use it to configure some things.
    • Tarean 8y ago
      I think powershell is kept in memory so only the first start should be slow. Although I don't really notice the first start being slower anymore - maybe it preloads depending on settings or is just fast enough with an ssd?
      • ygra 8y ago
        Windows picks up usage patterns and pre-loads applications to match that. But indeed, right after launching an application it's still in the disk cache anyway, so subsequent launches (until heavy I/O) should be quick.
      • Catfishfinger 8y ago
        This makes sense, I use Powershell all the time, have loads of PS modules installed and it opens pretty much instantly.
• nailer 8y ago
  Powershell 5 is slow. Powershell 6 preview is much faster (not as fast as bash but does more)
  • nailer 8y ago
    PS you can download it here https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases
• electricEmu 8y ago
  I'm not sure how often you start and stop your shells, but start time is seldom a concern. I enjoy you chose Hyper.js, which uses electron. I'm not sure what speed you were expecting there. You might try ConEmu https://conemu.github.io/ https://conemu.github.io/.
  • dagw 8y ago
    I love ConEmu, but it's still pretty slow starting up
    • mahmoudhossam 8y ago
      You can choose to have it run on startup and keep it in the system tray, that'll help with the startup time.
    • nickjj 8y ago
      What's your definition of slow? ConEmu takes about 1 full second to open a new window. Not too bad. But oddly enough, opening a new split panel takes about 2 seconds, which IMO is starting to feel slow, but it's not too big of a deal.
• oblio 8y ago
  cmd.exe is not getting any improvements, for better or for worse. And Powershell Core (Powershell 6) is quite snappy. Try it out. They changed the name to pwsh.exe, you can have them in parallel in your PATH.
• philo23 8y ago
  There's actually an option in Settings to swap between Powershell and cmd.exe in the Win + X menu. On top of that you can actually go in and customise it quite a bit to your own liking as it's just a folder inside your local app data: C:\Users\YourWindowsUsername\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX
  • shawnz 8y ago
    Unfortunately it has no effect on the menu in Windows Explorer which also dropped cmd for PowerShell recently.
    • userbinator 8y ago
      You can add a right-click "Console Here" menu item yourself. It's one of the things I've done on fresh installs of Windows since 95. HKCR\*\shell\Console Here\command Default="%WINDIR%\system32\cmd.exe" HKCR\Directory\shell\Console Here\command Default="%WINDIR%\system32\cmd.exe /k cd %1"
    • philo23 8y ago
      I tend not to use the file menu in Windows Explorer, but yeah it'd be nice if that option swapped it there too. I found out recently you can just type "cmd" in the Explorer address bar and hit enter and it'll open cmd.exe to the current directory, so long as you're not in a special shell folder or an unmapped network share. That's saved me a bunch of time.
      • 3rdAccount 8y ago
        I didn't know that. I usually just hit "ctrl + r" and then type in "cmd" and press "enter" and then navigate to the directory I want with "cd". Your pointer will save me time.
        • philo23 8y ago
          I believe it should work with any executable in your PATH but I've never tried it with anything beyond cmd.exe to be honest.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I think your experience is atypical. I use powershell everyday and I've not noticed any startup time difference between it and cmd. Are you sure you don't have some gigantic import in your profile.ps1? Are you launching the really terrible and definitely slow as balls to launch Powershell IDE? Frankly, given how superior powershell is as a language (both to cmd and bash) it is beyond me why anyone would consider a small startup cost difference a dealbreaker anyway.
  • Macha 8y ago
    I've got no powershell customizations, and an i5-4670k. I've also experienced Powershell having a very noticeably slow startup. It's about on par with my heavily modified zsh setup on a 2015 MBP for startup time (the same zsh setup starts up much faster on the same desktop). It's not a dealbreaker, but it's definitely an annoyance.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Very strange. My work rig is a downright geriatric Core2 Quad @ 2.66Ghz. There has to be some reason for the difference.
  • gobio 8y ago
    I think it's pretty typical: powershell is slower to start up than cmd. On my machine, i7, 16GB RAM, Windows 10, the fastest is cmd (instantaneous), then powershell (1s) and bash WSL (1s), then supper slow default install of git-bash (12s!). I cannot use git-bash because of that.
• tootie 8y ago
  I just keep one or two shells open all day.
• bitcrazed 8y ago
  Hi there! Author of the post that's the subject of this thread here :) Two questions: 1. Does your machine use a spinning disk for its system drive, or SSD? If the former, that's slowing you down more any anything else. STRONGLY recommend moving to SSD system drive if so. 2. Have you tried `powershell /noprofile` from Run dialog or Cmd? If you're still seeing PowerShell take > 600ms to load and start, likely something else is up. If you're expecting PowerShell to load faster than ~600ms, your expectations are likely a little out of whack - Cmd loads so fast because it's tiny and - relatively speaking - as dumb as a stump. PowerShell is a .NET language, and so loads the CLR, so incurs some overhead vs. Cmd, but it does A TON more that'll save you more time and effort over-all than any amount of time saving vs. starting Cmd. HTH.
  • bitcrazed 8y ago
    Oh … and re. Hyper - its awesome and beautiful, but it's an Electron app which means you're first loading and starting Electron base, then Chromium's JS & HTML engines, then loading A TON of JavaScript which has to be tokenized, parsed, compiled and executed every time you run it. This doesn't come cheap. Electron consumes & fills ~100MB working set just to get rolling, plus several more tens of MB to load, compile and execute. For example, on my 16GB Core-i7 Surface Pro 4, starting a single Hyper instance connected to Cmd, requires 134MB. Starting Console takes < 1s, and consumes 6MB.
  • romwell 8y ago
    Well, re: >1. Does your machine use a spinning disk for its system drive, or SSD? This really shouldn't be a question regarding the performance of a terminal window. If cmd.exe starts fast regardless, then so should Powershell if it is going to replace it. And on that note, on a new laptop with an SSD I can see a difference between Powershell and cmd.exe execution-to-prompt-ready time (however small that latency is). As long as that's the case, Powershell simply isn't a viable replacement for cmd.exe
    • bitcrazed 8y ago
      I am not comparing performance of a terminal window - Cmd and PowerShell both run connected to the same terminal app - Windows Console (conhost.exe) as discussed ad nauseum in the posts that are the subject of this thread. But you're comparing a 30+ year old command-line shell that was built in 1989 to primarily provide compatibility with MS-DOS, with a modern object-based shell that runs atop the .NET CLR and provides VASTLY more power and capability than the MUCH older, simpler, shell that it supersedes. It's like comparing startup perf of Notepad and VSCode … and saying that you won't use VSCode until it starts up as quickly as Notepad, even if VSCode saves you HOURS more per day/week than using Notepad would.