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by forgotusername 5109 days ago
My experience of Microsoft was that they're the most backward compatible source of technology around. Perhaps you could provide specific examples of breakage?

It's funny that this should come up in a thread about PowerShell, a replacement shell Microsoft released 6 years ago which still hasn't supplanted cmd.exe (which itself is based on syntax from the late 70s).
2 comments
coroxout 5108 days ago
In 1990 I used the MS-DOS 5 Edit tool and QBasic and picked up the shortcuts Ctrl-insert and Shift-insert for copy and paste.

I'm still using them 22 years later. They still work in most Windows applications and all MS applications even though they're not listed. They could easily have taken them out since Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V have been standard in Windows for so long, but they didn't.

I also got quite comfortable with using F2 and F4 to edit my previous DOS command, which still work in Command Prompt. And since Command Prompt now has tab completion and copy and paste, I don't really feel the need to add a bash-style command history. In fact I can never remember the bash equivalent of some of the cmd history shortcuts I use.

I have, however, installed the GOW package (see bmatzelle on github) for grep, less, wc etc at the command prompt. grep is so much faster than the MS equivalent "find" it's not funny, e.g. I just searched for a 9-digit number across 13 files containing 4 million lines (158MB) and grep took 1 second; find took 57.

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JamesLeonis 5109 days ago
It couldn't replace the command prompt because of security issues. Basically it made it very easy for virus writers to run powerful commands that the OS would blindly run. In response, Microsoft not only made scripts not executable by default, there is also a "signing" thingamajig where a script won't be executable unless it is specifically signed off to run[1], including those written by you.

[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx

It also isn't a drop in replacement for the command prompt. They exist as two separate programs, instead of the Unix general Terminal and shells run inside.

In my experience, Powershell has a lot of potential but is hampered by clunky interfaces and the lack of a true robust security system across the OS. Add on top of that the large malware industry around Windows, Powershell is basically a non-starter as a replacement for the vanilla command prompt.

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