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It's 2018 and microsoft is still re-inventing the wheel in the most useless way possible. As a linux-user, I almost take it as a given that I can just display m

It's 2018 and microsoft is still re-inventing the wheel in the most useless way possible. As a linux-user, I almost take it as a given that I can just display markdown in the terminal (in my case, using vim) and in the windows world it's apparently a totally new concept.

evfanknitram 8y ago
In Windows there's been a lot less emphasis on the terminal since most functionality has only been configurable using the UI. This is changing now. Your post is a little like complaining over a functional programming language adding OO-features or vice versa and saying they are late to the party.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
  I'd agree with that if windows was less bloated. If it was an acceptable position that it never had good terminal support because it did one thing and did it well, and that thing happened to be GUI, then yes, why bloat it with useless shell features that their user base doesn't need. Instead, windows has always been filled with features nobody wants or needs (looking at you, Internet Explorer 10), and most of them are way larger and probably took more development effort than it would have been to just build a good terminal emulator.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    You're rather missing the fact that Windows does not have a terminal I/O model. It has a console model. Consoles are what the 1960s terminal model evolved into during the 1980s; from firmware-mediated access to CGA, through the VIO+KBD+MOU subsystems of OS/2, to Windows NT console objects. * http://jdebp.info./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html http://jdebp.info./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.ht...
  - evfanknitram 8y ago
    You are crazy if you think that more people would prefer a terminal emulator than a built in web browser in Windows. There's a reason most home users use Windows and not Ubuntu, and it's not spelled terminal.
kierenj 8y ago
So you're saying they're bringing feature-parity to Windows, and improving the situation there, and that's useless? Run that by me again?
- zimablue 8y ago
  The argument is that they should adopt existing widely used tools not create their own walled garden which is an inferior copy in order to lock people into their system.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell for "every" system (values of any include linux and OSX). This isn't a walled garden any more than zsh is! It's an alternative shell. If you wanted bash on windows, you could have and still can get it from various vendors. Microsoft simply distributes a linux compatibility layer as a whole.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    "Inferior copy"? You're delusional. PowerShell is better in almost every possible way. It's more discoverable, more consistent, easier to script with, easier to read, and doesn't require error-prone text parsing in its pipeline. It's what you'd expect from 30 years of hindsight.
    - eropple 8y ago
      The spittle-flecking above is not great, but calling people delusional because they disagree with your choices about ultimately meaningless technical crap is a profoundly shitty thing that you should feel some measure of shame for doing. And I don't agree with you, either. While I like the idea of PowerShell (one of my GSoC submissions like a decade ago was to implement consistent coretools interfaces in C# so that another GSoCer's Mono-based shell could consume them) I personally find trying to actually write PowerShell--either in a script or on the command line--to be pretty disappointing. bash/zsh's syntax on the command line isn't great, but it's short and it's something with few enough permutations that writing it by hand is achievable; the hit-or-miss set, or lack thereof, of shorthand for commandlets and flags in PowerShell makes writing it difficult. Remembering the very long names, the strange syntax of stuff like a one-liner loop--it's pretty gnarly. Discoverable? Relatively speaking, yes. But it's not writable, to me. The experience is frontloaded for novices at the expense For a novice going `rm -rf` is surely complex; for an experienced programmer, writing `rm -Recurse -Force` is just gonna always be bad. (Ditto the odd co-opting of `rm` anyway; `grep` sure doesn't act like `grep` in PowerShell, the short aliases exist just to confuse.) In a script, and as a programming language rather than a shell language...much like any other shell language, I write it literally only when forced to and if it weren't for Microsoft privileging operations inside of it I can't see a situation where I'd write it over Ruby. Its variable scoping is odd and requires more cognitive power than variable scoping should (we fixed that in JavaScript!) and the oddly bash-ish comparison operators have no real place, for me, in writing code. (They're not good in bash, either, but PowerShell doesn't get that excuse--it's supposed to be better and isn't.) On top of that, there's a pretty good argument, and one I tend to agree with, that consistency is better than marginal improvements (and PowerShell is a marginal improvement over the combination of bash and Ruby or bash and Python). There is an alternate future where WSL has the ability to do everything, without blinking, that PowerShell can without having to get neck-deep in the .NET commandlet universe, and it's a universe where my tooling is drastically and radically simplified because I don't have to have completely separate execution paths just for that one client who actually cares about Windows. I don't find any of that "delusional", and I think you should fix your tone and apologize to the person you said that to.
IshKebab 8y ago
You can use Vim on Windows though. So if you don't want to use Vim (e.g. because you value sanity) then this is better than Linux.
- grumpydba 8y ago
  Terminals on windows still suck though

evfanknitram 8y ago

In Windows there's been a lot less emphasis on the terminal since most functionality has only been configurable using the UI. This is changing now. Your post is a little like complaining over a functional programming language adding OO-features or vice versa and saying they are late to the party.

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
I'd agree with that if windows was less bloated. If it was an acceptable position that it never had good terminal support because it did one thing and did it well, and that thing happened to be GUI, then yes, why bloat it with useless shell features that their user base doesn't need. Instead, windows has always been filled with features nobody wants or needs (looking at you, Internet Explorer 10), and most of them are way larger and probably took more development effort than it would have been to just build a good terminal emulator.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  You're rather missing the fact that Windows does not have a terminal I/O model. It has a console model. Consoles are what the 1960s terminal model evolved into during the 1980s; from firmware-mediated access to CGA, through the VIO+KBD+MOU subsystems of OS/2, to Windows NT console objects. * http://jdebp.info./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html http://jdebp.info./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.ht...
- evfanknitram 8y ago
  You are crazy if you think that more people would prefer a terminal emulator than a built in web browser in Windows. There's a reason most home users use Windows and not Ubuntu, and it's not spelled terminal.

kierenj 8y ago

So you're saying they're bringing feature-parity to Windows, and improving the situation there, and that's useless? Run that by me again?

zimablue 8y ago
The argument is that they should adopt existing widely used tools not create their own walled garden which is an inferior copy in order to lock people into their system.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- freeone3000 8y ago
  https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell for "every" system (values of any include linux and OSX). This isn't a walled garden any more than zsh is! It's an alternative shell. If you wanted bash on windows, you could have and still can get it from various vendors. Microsoft simply distributes a linux compatibility layer as a whole.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  "Inferior copy"? You're delusional. PowerShell is better in almost every possible way. It's more discoverable, more consistent, easier to script with, easier to read, and doesn't require error-prone text parsing in its pipeline. It's what you'd expect from 30 years of hindsight.
  - eropple 8y ago
    The spittle-flecking above is not great, but calling people delusional because they disagree with your choices about ultimately meaningless technical crap is a profoundly shitty thing that you should feel some measure of shame for doing. And I don't agree with you, either. While I like the idea of PowerShell (one of my GSoC submissions like a decade ago was to implement consistent coretools interfaces in C# so that another GSoCer's Mono-based shell could consume them) I personally find trying to actually write PowerShell--either in a script or on the command line--to be pretty disappointing. bash/zsh's syntax on the command line isn't great, but it's short and it's something with few enough permutations that writing it by hand is achievable; the hit-or-miss set, or lack thereof, of shorthand for commandlets and flags in PowerShell makes writing it difficult. Remembering the very long names, the strange syntax of stuff like a one-liner loop--it's pretty gnarly. Discoverable? Relatively speaking, yes. But it's not writable, to me. The experience is frontloaded for novices at the expense For a novice going `rm -rf` is surely complex; for an experienced programmer, writing `rm -Recurse -Force` is just gonna always be bad. (Ditto the odd co-opting of `rm` anyway; `grep` sure doesn't act like `grep` in PowerShell, the short aliases exist just to confuse.) In a script, and as a programming language rather than a shell language...much like any other shell language, I write it literally only when forced to and if it weren't for Microsoft privileging operations inside of it I can't see a situation where I'd write it over Ruby. Its variable scoping is odd and requires more cognitive power than variable scoping should (we fixed that in JavaScript!) and the oddly bash-ish comparison operators have no real place, for me, in writing code. (They're not good in bash, either, but PowerShell doesn't get that excuse--it's supposed to be better and isn't.) On top of that, there's a pretty good argument, and one I tend to agree with, that consistency is better than marginal improvements (and PowerShell is a marginal improvement over the combination of bash and Ruby or bash and Python). There is an alternate future where WSL has the ability to do everything, without blinking, that PowerShell can without having to get neck-deep in the .NET commandlet universe, and it's a universe where my tooling is drastically and radically simplified because I don't have to have completely separate execution paths just for that one client who actually cares about Windows. I don't find any of that "delusional", and I think you should fix your tone and apologize to the person you said that to.

IshKebab 8y ago

You can use Vim on Windows though. So if you don't want to use Vim (e.g. because you value sanity) then this is better than Linux.

grumpydba 8y ago
Terminals on windows still suck though