Usage - Coders vs Writer

[Chris Miller]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Michael Leone <turgon at mike-leone.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Chris Miller
>  <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  "There ain't no right or wrong!"  Thank heavens for Linux and
>  >  Open-Source Software in general for liberating us from the (nasty!)
>  >  Windows CMD shell tyranny, and giving us the choice to decide for
>  >  ourselves what the computer should be.
>
>  Hey, I *like* the Windows CMD shell. :-) Yes, it's very simple, when
>  stacked up against other scripting languages. But you can get Perl and
>  Python for Windows (I have both, altho - I don't know perl - I just
>  use it to run pre-written scripts, as - I'm guessing - a large number
>  of Linux users do; not everybody can be a coder ...). And the new
>  Windows PowerShell is supposed to be much more powerful.

CMD has very bad command remembrance ordering.  I often have to
perform commands repeatedly (compiling software until it runs the
right way) and not being able to trust it to work correctly when I hit
the up arrow key is really an annoyance.  Sometimes it works
correctly, but other times it messes up the command history very
badly.  The commands come back out of order, and it's more work for me
to either find the command I just used, or type it in again.

I have PS, and I think it's a good step up from CMD.  It's still not
everything bash is though.  It has this annoying need to put paths in
commas if there's a space (on Linux it would just be /home/Lord\
Sauron/whatever, not "\Users\Lord Sauron\whatever").  It's annoying to
have to bully it into doing what I want.  It's also incongruous coming
from CMD.  In CMD you can execute a local command by just typing it.
PS requires the full .\command syntax.  This is what bash does, but PS
is getting hurt by the Windows backwhack use.  It's just harder to
type a \ all the time.  Why they couldn't accept either/or, like
Cygwin, is beyond me.

PS is also supposed to have some interesting new "cmdlets," which
allow you to script more actions.  Sounds a heck of a lot like putting
a shell script into my path on Linux though.

I think PS is meant to "catch up" to a lot of Open-Source command line
innovations that Windows has been lacking for the past twenty years.
Geez, DOS as it was with Windows 95 didn't even have tab completion or
command history support.

And no, Python doesn't count ;-) (Just kidding)

-- 
Registered Linux Addict #431495
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