To say that it's missing features is to imply that they could add features and then it would be as good. That's not the case I see, as a shell is little without the surrounding ecosystem, and Windows doesn't have it.

PowerShell is missing QWAN; The linux CLI is the same if you boot to it or boot to a GUI and open a terminal, or SSH in. It has a wide ecosystem of meta-apps which aid using the CLI such as screen and less, and it's been built up over the years with bash/readline keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that lots of nix programs are CLI programs with GUI wrappers, or configured with text files you can edit in emacs/vim.

The Windows command line window is all there is (you can't boot to 'DOS' anymore, or SSH in without third party software - and if you do it's a different kind of experience). There's nothing much to do as most programs aren't CLI programs and aren't configured with text files and aren't scriptable and you don't really want to poke around in the registry if you have to be typing "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\..." or whatever. There are no emacs keyboard shortcuts and everything is shoved in folders with long names and capital letters and spaces and it's just not as good*. On top of that, PowerShell is a misleading name - since it's not really a shell, it's more like irb or the Python interactive interpreter. Sure you can "change directories" and such, but it's not really a bash competitor, not a shell in that sense.

But on paper, feature for feature? Who knows, they're probably quite close...

Sorry I honestly can't, I've never heard of PowerShell, nor have I ever used win 2003 server.

However, the most obvious feature its missing is I can't run it on xp or vista. Why do I need to run a server to have a decent shell? I find having a nice shell handy for various day to day development tasks.

edit: whoops, turns out I'm totally wrong, thanks nfg.

Yes you can, powershell is available for both XP and Vista. Google it.

I'm not a shell expert, but I wanted something unix like when work dictated that I would be on XP, so I downloaded Windows PS. Maybe I have an old machine, but it was sluggish, it didn't seem to share the same system environment variables to the point of annoyance.

...speaking of slow... I just found out why my shell was so slow: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/08/update-g...

posix, it still doesn't support enough posix to make all the tools I use in linux natively available. so long as I need cygwin or msys for git, it won't be good enough.