Is there any chance cmd and powershell will improve from a user interface perspective? And perhaps become usable? Cmd has been garbage since it's inception.
cmd is parked for pretty much everything except for major issues. It's a scary codebase that has a LOT of code that's dependent on it, and we can't really add any new features there without the possibility of breaking someone.
This feature is mostly focused on the other end of the communication, on being able to create new Terminal windows to run shells inside of them.
Is the pay-off big enough? Who knows what garbage code they might want to hide in there, for both technical reasons (including security) or even legal ones.
Is there a chance this will be connected to a functional shell interface. I get your point that cmd cannot be upgraded because of legacy issues and that is understandable and unfortunate, but windows needs a proper shell. This is obviously a great start for one side of the equation. But until there is a decent terminal app, windows will continue to be a nonstarter.
It sounds like you're asking for two different things here:
cmd.exe is a shell, and that's the guy that's parked.
conhost.exe is a terminal, and that's under active development, though it's slower than something like VsCode, because we can't just go adding features as we see fit, we have a LOT of back compat we still need to support.
Fortunately, conpty will allow for the creation of new terminal applications on Windows. If you're looking for a better shell experience on windows, I can point you to powershell or even [yori](http://www.malsmith.net/yori/), which looks pretty cool
Exactly, I understand there are different underlying concepts and systems to the front end and what it interacts with. It just seem incredible that windows is basically stuck with a windows 95 interface for a shell.
Powershell is open source, the 6.1 preview 4 is nice and fast, and you get real objects with keys rather than scraping for regexs all the time like bash.
Powershell doesn't get any credit for the tab completion when the default behavior for it just makes the verbosity even more of a nuisance. Having tab completion scroll through all the possible completions one at a time doesn't save keystrokes in most cases, especially when there are dozens or hundreds of options that are really long so when you give up on tab completion and decide to type it out manually in full, you have to erase 10-20 characters. The bash-style completion behavior of completing any unambiguous characters then giving you a list of the possibilities would be even more useful for powershell than it is for bash. But Microsoft once again had to throw in gratuitous differences at the cost of usability.
That's subjective opinion. I much prefer the Windows way because I can either specify additional characters or keep hitting tab to until what I want comes up. "Display all 1026 possibilities? (y or n)" certainly isn't an improvement.
Not to mention of course that it tab completes things bash can't and doesn't, and all the other reasons your initial comment was wrong.
> I much prefer the Windows way because I can either specify additional characters or keep hitting tab to until what I want comes up.
You can't specify additional characters until after you've erased all of the incorrect trailing characters that powershell filled in, and that's where powershell's completion method runs up the keystroke count unreasonably. Your comparison isn't valid if you ignore that aspect. It's also not very subjective at all. We're talking about objectively countable keystrokes.
I will concede that out of the box bash doesn't offer completion for anything other than file and command names, but it does include a programmable completion feature and many packages provide completion rules for their commands. It's up to the distro to determine whether to enable all of those completion rules by default or to stick with the more limited but predictable file-only completion behavior.
Aside from that, I can't see what "all the other reasons your initial comment was wrong" are; you appear to have only cited the existence of concise aliases for some commands as a refutation, and that obviously doesn't put powershell ahead of bash in any way, just lessens the severity of that downside.
> you appear to have only cited the existence of concise aliases for some commands as a refutation
You claim that PowerShell is overly verbose, I point out that it is only verbose if you intentionally make it verbose for readability, you proceed to pick nits and pretend you've done some elaborate study on keystroke counts or something, then resort to tired old Linux evangelism mainstays like blaming the distro.
Ah but see, now you're conflating two different things:
cmd.exe is a shell
conhost and cmder are terminals.
I believe cmder can come with git bash as well, which is also a shell.
The confusion comes from when you launch cmd, the window that appears by default is conhost, with cmd running attached to it. When you launch cmder, it's also running attached to cmd.
