[justanother]

I have never, and I mean never, been a Windows user, even though I've been using computers since 1982. During the rise of Wintel in the early 1990s, I followed the rise of Linux and 386BSD. When Win95 and NT ruled the business desktop in the late 1990s, I sought refuge in SPARCStations, Linux, and discontinued NeXT hardware. After the turn of the century, I adopted the newly-POSIX-compliant Mac OS. All this to say, avoidance of Microsoft products has been a cornerstone of my computing policy for nearly half a century (with the notable exception of Applesoft BASIC).

But PowerShell? PowerShell's nice.

[heresie-dabord]

You have long experience in computing and especially in the innovative currents that shifted the paradigm. Cheers!

Your first paragraph creates expectation that the second paragraph disappoints, though. Would you explain why you think PowerShell is "nice"?

[justanother]

It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.

[Kon-Peki]

> It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.

I remember watching a video on one of the various Microsoft learning sites in which Snover and another guy were interviewed about the creation of PowerShell. One of the two guys said that after they realized that UNIX-style wasn’t going to work they turned to VMS and drew a lot of inspiration from it.

[jojobas]

Pretty sure arrow-recall predates Powershell and in fact Windows itself, it was there since DOS.

Even Tab-path completion had to be done in an incompatible way.

[neves]

You posted just at the same time I asked. What's makes PowerShell better than bash?

[oblio]

1. Structured data passed along pipelines.

2. Automatic introspection/command completion for command parameters, even user-created commands.

You can argue about a lot of other things Powershell does, but these 2 things are things which if Bash were designed today by 100 top notch software developers, would probably be part of 95 of their designs.