Comment by realusername
8 years ago
It's not only about this, you needed to install more and more things every year in windows for it to work. You needed to install Cygwin, a proper terminal (cmd.exe isn't exactly usable), python libraries, Putty, now Docker... Not to mention that since developers are only using Linux and Mac, you will have libraries which does not work on windows (because nobody even tried).
> cmd.exe isn't exactly usable
Depends, for the occasional deep into CLI world to run a script, is quite ok.
Granted, the defaults regarding mouse copy-paste and window size were only improved on Windows 10.
> Not to mention that since developers are only using Linux and Mac, you will have libraries which does not work on windows (because nobody even tried).
Not all developers are pure UNIX devs doing POSIXy stuff.
I agree - cmd.exe is quite usable, especially considering it's (almost) always available no matter what machine you use.
Why they're trying to replace it with Powershell rather than improving cmd.exe is silly, however.
I happen to like Powershell's idea, as it is the closest to the REPL experience on Xerox PARC inspired systems, we get to have on mainstream environments, by using objects and having access to the full set OS APIs on the scripting prompt.
However I do think it could have been made less verbose and dislike the ps1 extension, as the 1 (one) does not make sense.
5 replies →
> You needed to install Cygwin
Just install Ubuntu Shell.
Also, it's not like you don't need to install iTerm, zsh, docker, python libraries etc on mac. It's not like it comes with them by default. Your argument is kind of moot.
You do not need to install iTerm and zsh; Terminal.app and bash will do the job just fine, alternate terminal and shell are just preferences.
cmd.exe and conhost.exe won't do the job.
Also zsh is pre-installed with the latest few versions of OS X anyway.
That's an interesting point.
Mabye Homebrew, and its predecessors, were the real killer apps for mac?
A good terminal and python are both standard with OSX. Though I agree having homebrew does make life easier. Don't think Windows has an equivalent...
Perhaps it was more the underlying compiler tool chain. With the compilers included in MacOS you can install nearly anything.
chocolatey
In addition to all the typical Bash tools, you also have C/C++/Objective-C, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, SQLite, and Apache.
Maybe I just don't remember installing it, but I think macs have zsh out-of-the-box too.
For PHP, MySQL and Apache on Windows I just unzip three different zip files and and then add some standard configuration. Done.