Windows and the Command Prompt
Windows was designed with a graphical interface first, and a text interface second. As a result, its graphical interface is better than its text interface.
Unix was designed with a text interface first, and a graphical interface second. As a result, its text interface is (usually) better than its graphical interface.
OS X is not Unix, but it was built on top of Unix (…kind of). Apple took the great text interface Unix had, added on its own graphical interface, and that made everything just about perfect.
Windows has been getting better the past few years, though! In June of this year they’ll be releasing Windows Terminal which sounds like a huge improvement, and for the past year or so they’ve also had Windows Subsystem for Linux. But Windows Terminal isn’t here yet.
The normal Windows command line is called Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe.
Command Prompt/cmd.exe
Command Prompt is terrible. Cutting and pasting is almost impossible, you can’t easily resize the window, and it’s missing a million and one common Unix commands.
Life is very sad when you have to use it.
PowerShell
In Windows 7 Microsoft added a second command line, called PowerShell. This was Microsoft trying hard to make a good command line!
PowerShell is fiiiiine, but all of the commands are very very very different than the popular normal commands that everyone else uses on Unix-style computers.
| PowerShell | Use | Unix |
|---|---|---|
Get-Help |
manual/help for a command | man |
Get-Location |
print current directory | pwd |
Get-ChildItem |
list files in a directory | ls |
| … | … | … |
PowerShell might be easier to understand the first time you use it, but those commands sure are long! The thousandth time you type Get-ChildItem instead of ls I guarantee you will be at least a little unhappy.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
In 2016, Windows made another terminal that works in Windows 10 and sits on top of Linux. Kind of. It’s great, but having it talk to your normal Windows machine is a pain in the ass, though.
Windows Console
They just announced this, but it isn’t coming out until June. It looks pretty good?
Maybe this is Windows finally making one final good command prompt?
Cmder.exe
Since Command Prompt is so bad and PowerShell is so different and everything else is new or complicated, we’re going to try out Cmder, a program that goes on top of Command Prompt. Almost everything is the same, but it adds nice colors, the ability to cut and paste, and common Unix commands.