Powershell terminal sucks. Is there a better choice?

El Reg reader h4rm0ny wants your advice. Here goes. I've been using Bash for well over a decade. (About fifteen years?). I'm reasonable with it. I'm now teaching myself Powershell and whilst some of it I like, the default environment is terrible. I'm not talking about the language itself, but the fact that to use Powershell …

[Anonymous Coward]

Edit the properties of the PS window

In the upper left corner of the window there's a right-click drop-down menu: the capital sigma icon. Select "properties"; that lets you edit the layout of the window, as well as turn on quickedit mode (options), which enables cut and paste with mouse buttons. Layout lets you modify the number of lines and their width. Font lets you select from a small number of fonts. Colors lets you select colors for text, background, popup text and popup background. These changes will stick until you modify them again.

[Guus Leeuw]

Dear Harmony,

May point out that I am at an utter loss as to why you don't know how crappy the default Powershell is? Reason being that you are "teaching yourself" Powershell, so you must have, by definition, come across Powershell when you learned it...

Or maybe Harmony is the handle because of the three people living inside: the one who learned and can now teach, the one who needs to be taught, and the one holding the other in Harmony...

Interesting case, nevertheless!

Regards,

Guus

[Kristian Walsh]

Helpful comment?

Dear Guus,

I am at an utter loss as to why you don't know what the English idiom "to teach oneself" means? Reason being that you have composed a message in grammatically-correct English whose sole purpose seems to be to insult the original poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

cygwin

[phuzz]

If I want a *nix style terminal on my windows machine, I don't install cywin, I just use Putty to SSH to a linux machine and use it there. Windows is for windows-y stuff, and Linux is for linuxy stuff, each tool has a preferred use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Advice ?

Depending on why you are doing such a silly thing the correct answer may simply be:

Windows >>>===>> EXIT

Rationale: No Windows == No PowerShell == No problem

[jake]

The eldist Niece reports ...

A combination of Cygwin, windows version of perl & REXX (with a splash of ruby) does a much nicer job of admining her highschool's network than the microsoft alternative. As always, BSD on the internet facing kit, and Slackware on the internal admin boxen. Seems to work nicely, even though she swears at the school district's policy of "LCD computing".

She's 17, graduated early, and will be off to Uni in September. She has been employed by the school district full time since the beginning of the year.

[h4rm0ny]

Re: The eldist Niece reports ...

I have this funny feeling your niece's highschool are going to miss her. A lot. :)

[uncle.bob]

You should try to use Xterm with the Window Manager Ratpoison -> Screenshot http://www.hackers-lab.org/index.php?title=Ratpoison

in this example I use emacs-nox in xterm ... have fun!

[FPfirst]

Shells are Primitive

I have never used a shell for any scripting. I go straight to the F# REPL.

F# is a statically typed language with strong type inference so it feels like a dynamically typed language.

You can interactively develop a script in Visual Studio where you get the full intellisense experience (and red squiggles). When done, you can run the script via the fsi.exe command line.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shells are Primitive

"I have never used a shell for any scripting. I go straight to the F# REPL."

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233175.aspx:

"F# Interactive can be used to write code at the console or in a window in Visual Studio."

So in other words... it's a shell.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the score at half-time

Not comprehensive, but:

14 offtopic posts pushing, or defending pushing the use of bash/cygwin/perl for Windows SysAdmin

1 AC troll slagging off powershell, no other contribution

3 posts discussing languages in a completely irrelevant context

1 post from Guus trolling h4rm0ny for not knowing all this already.

1 offtopic post informing us all of how primitive shells are

1 offtopic post about xterm and using the ratpoison WM

1 AC and 1 non-AC troll coming out with the usual 'use Open Source,'cos MS suxx0rs' fuckwittery.

2 non-AC trolls slagging off cygwin, no other contribution

1 non-AC post informing us all how he hasn't used Powershell but it 'seems a bit weird'. Thanks for that.

7 actually constructive posts on ISE/LINQPad

1 constructive post on managing the console as it is.

5 constructive posts mentioning Sapien Powershell Studio, Console 2 and ConEmu etc

1 constructive post on .Net integration

1 post from jake with his usual irrelevant shite.

On-topic, here's a couple of other possibilities that build on the functionality of ISE

I'm currently experimenting with ASE (Admin Script Editor) - this was previously a commercial product for Powershell, the scripting host and KixStart that is now being provided free by the developers. Pretty useful, but the lack of a defined future (or potentially any future) for the product is slightly discouraging.

I haven't done so yet, but Powershell Plus from Idera is on my list of free IDEs to look at, as is Powershell Analyser

Others have mentioned products from Sapien and some interesting sounding FOSS consoles, so I'll leave it at that.

[WOOOOO]

I like Power GUI (Quest/Dell) as I like the way you get the extra window showing variables and their contents, I find it helpful to expand object properties especially when the an object nests layers.

[Spoonsinger]

In what way, (other than GUI), does Powershell actually suck?

I haven't had anything overly problematic with anything I needed to do in it. Is this just a troll question or is there something fundamentally wrong with it which I need to know about, just in case?

[h4rm0ny]

Re: In what way, (other than GUI), does Powershell actually suck?

It's not a troll question and I don't think it does suck. I originally posted this question on the user forums because I was learning Powershell and found that the standard terminal for it was way behind the GNU/Linux equivalents. I actually quite like Powershell itself.

I think you replied a little too hastily to my post, tbh, if that's how you see it.

[Zane]

Sad but true

Tried to work with Powershell for about 6 months.

And I was really upset with it, and thought exactly the same: there must be a better way to use this.

If there is, then nobody shares it on the internet.

Compared to Unix shell, powershell doesn't come near. The object-orientedness is a nice concept, but in practice it's not that helpful.

What I used instead:

pyshell - much nicer, but I'm not a python fan.

gitbash (needs mingw) - just feels home when you are used to Unix shell scripting. Using that now for about 18 months, and I'm happy with it.

Sorry that I do not have a better answer. But I think that fellow posters show that this is as it is.

/Zane

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sad but true

"Compared to Unix shell, powershell doesn't come near. "

Actually Powershell is way more powerful than say Bash - you have to use addins for Bash to even come close to what Powershell provides and even then Powershell is a long ahead.

[Hans 1]

Re: Sad but true

Call me when it has a proper regex implementation, that Winglob-regex bastard is awful.

[TheVogon]

Re: Sad but true

Powershell already has a fully capable Regex implementation. What you presumably mean is that it is different from what you are used to in say Perl.

[Hans 1]

I ssh in from my OpenIndiana box....

[Tyrion]

Kill it with fire!

Cygwin is about the best it gets on Windows unfortunately. And even that's in a horrible bog standard Windows console. After using a Linux terminal it's like long nails on a chalkboard.

Even if you can get past PowerShell's fisher price UI, you're got to deal with an excruciatingly verbose syntax, that's ostensibly designed to cause as much RSI as possible. It's awful really. I pity the poor soul who has to use that monstrosity on a daily basis.

[Alt0n]

cygwin shell

These days a fresh cygwin install gives you mintty, a superior terminal based on PuTTY. If you're still suffering the old cygwin terminal, get it installed :)

[Tyrion]

Re: cygwin shell

> These days a fresh cygwin install gives you mintty, a superior terminal based on PuTTY. If you're still suffering the old cygwin terminal, get it installed :)

I haven't used it for some time so I didn't know that. I'll have to give a try again, thanks :)

[herry]

Try PowerShell on top of ConEmu

[Anonymous Coward]

i just love it

Get a room full of diverse technical specialists and ask them which is the best technology for a given job.

Stand back.

Start recording fight for later Youtube hilarity.

Its like looking at my own firm on-line!

[h4rm0ny]

Re: i just love it

>>Start recording fight for later Youtube hilarity.

Well okay... But make sure you encode in H.264, not VP8.

[dub_dub]

You're all missing the point of the question

Use conemu or console2 they are far better than the standard console and have tabs, full size windowing decent cut paste etc.

install vim for text editing and you'll never leave the cli again.

If you want a proper ide then powergui is about the best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You're all missing the point of the question

Trying ConEmu now, most impressed cheers for the info.

[smug git]

Conemu ftw

Conemu is excellent; I don't find it _quite_ as good as a typical linux console but the fact that I get to use powershell instead of bash is most welcome, certainly welcome enough to live with any small deficiencies in the Conemu console.

[Adrian Bool]

There is a StackOverflow question asking the same thing,

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60950/is-there-a-better-windows-console-window

...with the top response being for the ConEmu terminal,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/conemu/

Quite possibly just what you need! I'll be checking it out too!

[Stevie]

Bah!

The really encouraging thing about the spurious 'bash is better' "debate" is that it shows this old man that he was right in something he theorized a few years ago: much of the rabid Windows=crap, MS=evil zeitgeist in the post 90s graduate population seems to spring from "not what I know", something I am familiar with having worked on more operating systems than some *nix SAs would credit existing (they seemingly being of the 2+1 school of OSs: *nix, Windows and whatever apple is doing).

I work in a large *nix department which is twinned with a large windows one. The *nix SAs spend a lot of time laughing about how much better they are than the windows crowd at what we do. So much time, In fact, that no-one ever seems to get round to making it true.

Time and again when we are in panic mode it is the windows SA teams that have plans in place, procedures to follow, and contingency schedules up and running in a jiffy, while my lot flail around, answering "why can't you just do what they do?" with "well, it's windows!" and scrambling for their little black books in which they keep their alchemical secrets to themselves. An unscheduled absence during one of these events can be a thing of high comedy to watch unfold.

Our hot line can contact users (our user base in in the thousands) impacted by a server outage with good estimates of the down time expected - if those users happen to have the good fortune to be working on apps located on a windows server. If they are using one of our *nix servers they are, to use dense technical jargon, SOL. We have an enterprise-wide system for enabling this technology, but it involves the SAs knowing what is running on their servers and entering that list on a database. This they claim they are too busy to do (a blatant lie obvious to even the most oblivious upper manager).

I'm not popular just now because after the last disaster, when we were asked for ideas to improve the *nix departmental image, I suggested the SAs wear Stetsons so there would be no confusion as to their professionalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

This topic

could have been quite useful but, as usual, the posts are not quite what was intended by the author of the article. In case you forgot, during your mindless BASH vs PS vs Microsoft vs UNIX wars that are just completely irrelevant, the author wanted to know if there was an alternative to the shell not a fuckin alternative to the language.

wankers.