> cmd.exe isn't exactly usable

Depends, for the occasional deep into CLI world to run a script, is quite ok.

Granted, the defaults regarding mouse copy-paste and window size were only improved on Windows 10.

> Not to mention that since developers are only using Linux and Mac, you will have libraries which does not work on windows (because nobody even tried).

Not all developers are pure UNIX devs doing POSIXy stuff.

I agree - cmd.exe is quite usable, especially considering it's (almost) always available no matter what machine you use.

Why they're trying to replace it with Powershell rather than improving cmd.exe is silly, however.

I happen to like Powershell's idea, as it is the closest to the REPL experience on Xerox PARC inspired systems, we get to have on mainstream environments, by using objects and having access to the full set OS APIs on the scripting prompt.

However I do think it could have been made less verbose and dislike the ps1 extension, as the 1 (one) does not make sense.

Verbosity is something I tend to reserve for scripts (which should not rely on certain aliases existing). In the shell code I write approaches golfing idioms (perhaps inspired by the fact that I learned PowerShell by golfing in it). I think they've done a good job of having the verbose things readable and understandable, while also being able to shorten parameters as long as they remain unambiguous (and offering short aliases for cmdlets that are used all the time).

I heard they wanted to use the ps extension but that has long been used for PostScript, and though very few Windows users use PostScript files directly they still didn't want to step on those toes. Particularly, they were very cautious about using anything that looked like an existing file extension because they didn't want it to be an easy vector for malware to confuse users. ps1 doesn't step on any toes, at least, and looks weird enough to an average computer user that they might hesitate to double click one.

Might be, I would have prefered something like psh, but it is just nitpicking anyway.

Powershell has short default aliases for its verbose builtins, and most parameters have short versions as well.

For instance, "%" is an alias for ForEach-Object, "ls" for Get-ChildItem, etc. And you can of course define your own.

True, I was just speaking in general.

> You needed to install Cygwin

Just install Ubuntu Shell.

Also, it's not like you don't need to install iTerm, zsh, docker, python libraries etc on mac. It's not like it comes with them by default. Your argument is kind of moot.

You do not need to install iTerm and zsh; Terminal.app and bash will do the job just fine, alternate terminal and shell are just preferences.

cmd.exe and conhost.exe won't do the job.

Also zsh is pre-installed with the latest few versions of OS X anyway.

That's an interesting point.

Mabye Homebrew, and its predecessors, were the real killer apps for mac?

A good terminal and python are both standard with OSX. Though I agree having homebrew does make life easier. Don't think Windows has an equivalent...

Perhaps it was more the underlying compiler tool chain. With the compilers included in MacOS you can install nearly anything.

chocolatey

In addition to all the typical Bash tools, you also have C/C++/Objective-C, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, SQLite, and Apache.

Maybe I just don't remember installing it, but I think macs have zsh out-of-the-box too.

For PHP, MySQL and Apache on Windows I just unzip three different zip files and and then add some standard configuration. Done.