There is nothing wrong with current shell. Who needs window resize or copy&paste anyway?

Now, now, be fair.

alt-space > e > p becomes pure muscle memory.

It's actually a really elegant key combination that I definitely did not have to look up 10 times before it stuck because no other program uses it.

And of course powershell, which doesn't Get-Have-The-Most-Over-Verbose-And-Stupid-Naming-Conventions-Ever and have a terrible language design that results in [console]::writeline("Powershell {0} being a complete farce", "not") solves a lot of these problems.

Just to be fair:

1. Clink [−7½] and PSReadLine [𝜋] both enable you to press Ctrl+V. On Unix-likes you're told to use a better terminal emulator to handle such cases nicely (something like ytcxbcixvt or what's hot these days) and most people don't think twice about heeding that advice, yet on Windows people willingly suffer, grumbling and complaining?

2. gal and Tab help a lot. And I actually prefer commands like Import-Csv over things like almf in readability (at least they weren't formed by bashing your head on the keyboard). But that might just be me.

3. 'PowerShell {0} being a complete farce' -f 'not'. In the scripts I've written I could probably count the number of [Console]::WriteLine calls on one hand (unary).

[−7½] http://mridgers.github.io/clink/

[𝜋] https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

Surely just turn on "QuickEdit mode" and paste by clicking the mouse.

You can resize a cmd shell in the properties, and as someone posted in a sister thread, turn on Quickedit to smooth out copy and paste.

Turning on tab completion requires some fiddling though (and I have no idea if it survives in newer version of Windows).

Seriously, have you tried these "solutions"? It's like rubbing salt into the wound.

Sure. But I don't have a lot of Unix/Linux background, so I don't really know what I'm missing.

(I anyway wouldn't try to defend them as solutions, just clarifications of what is possible)

I've been using ConEmu [0] for over a year now, and it's miles better than the default console. I actually spend a majority of my time in Windows in the console now.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/conemu/

Blackbox is working on windows 8. If you head over to deviant art you can find some shots of working setups on the Blackbox group: http://blackboxdesktop.deviantart.com/

That's a very fragmented community, there seems to be zipfiles of random builds of dubious origin flying everywhere. Where's the "upstream" source?

LiteStep seems to be active with development much easier to follow than BlackBox - https://github.com/lsdev/LiteStep

I ran a whole lab of Litestep customized for a library once. I loved it. Later on, when I got into Linux, I fell in love again with the more exotic WM's largely because of my experience with Litestep.

I have to admin Winboxen all day, so I should try it out with Windows 7. I have not used it in ages. What is said is, last time I had this inclination, they lost part of their CVS/SVN history (after a recent upgrade) in part due to lapsing hosting or something.

I think I begged for a copy of the repo for nostalgia and got it from a newer dev.

Long live Litestep! Try to have a student hack into a Windows kiosk running Litestep, and boy oh boy will they (and so did I) find it difficult to get into system tools on the spot!

Is there a centralized site for blackbox? I had trouble finding resources when installing on windows 7.

I was also expecting a new GUI shell and used to run GeoShell and Litestep. I got somewhat excited and hoped that there might be a resurgence in the popularity of Windows shells but it seems like that time is gone for good now.

If I recall correctly, the Windows XP release managed to stabilize the Explorer shell quite a bit (compared to Win9x) which in turn decreased the demand for a lightweight, stable and customizable replacements.

I believe lightstep is also working on windows 8 now.

KDE, but it's still fledgling on Windows: http://windows.kde.org/

Power shell?

They meant a replacement for Explorer as the GUI shell. Don't confuse the following things:

1. Command-line shell (cmd, PowerShell, bash, whatnot)

2. GUI shell / desktop environment (Explorer, Gnome, KDE)

3. Console host / terminal emulator (conhost, console2, conemu, xterm, ...)

Invariable all of those are referred to as »shell«, sometimes even by people who ought to know better. The linked site makes the same mistake. It's not a new shell for Windows, it's just zsh bundled with cygwin.