MSH - it's definately worth a look

[beard0]

Ryan Paul gives a very good overview of Microsoft's new beta command shell (MSH), available for download here.
It comes from Microsoft, but I definately think it's still worth playing with.

[rizzix]

for once! something usable

[wtd]

It looks interesting, at first glance, but its practicality is at best dubious.

There is a reason bash and other shells have inconsistencies. They makw things easier.

[Martin]

wtd, you bash Microsoft for their inconsistancies, and now you're bashing them for being consistant. Is this just because it has a Microsoft logo on it?

This isn't trying to be other shells. It's trying to take everything a step further. Looks pretty good to me, I can't find anything really to complain about. Too bad I got suckered in by Apple, I want to try this out.

[wtd]

It's not a very good general purpose programming language, and it's not a very good command shell.

[Naveg]

compared to what windows previously had it's pretty good.

one complaint i've always had about the windows command line though: the tab completion sucks! press p[tab] and it fills in the first p in the directory instead of showing a list of options. gah.

[Martin]

I really hate how capitalization doesn't matter. Linux has ruined me. Or, well, enlightened me.

Perl still wins though.

[wtd]

Martin wrote:

I really hate how capitalization doesn't matter. Linux has ruined me. Or, well, enlightened me.

Your Mac will give you a little bit of both worlds. The HFS+ filesystem is case-insensitive, but also case-preserving.

Quote:

Perl still wins though.

Perl's very nifty.

Basically, when I complain about MSH, think of this simple example:

Get a directory listing which shows hidden files. In a bash-type environment, you'd pass an option to "ls". In the MSH-style environment, what you get from the equivalent to "ls" is what you get, and then you have to externally apply filters to get the information you desire.

This is very nice and pure from a CS standpoint, but it can be a pain in the butt as well. There's something called "Huffman coding", which says that the most common of tasks should be the easiest. MSH seems to overlook that entirely in its bid to be more "sophisticated" than something like bash.

[Martin]

Or you pass options to their equivalent of ls, no?

[wtd]

No, because the MSH philosophy eschews such in favor of commands which have very minimal and uniform options.

Of course, you could probably very easily create your own "ls", but then you have a world where there are 80 gazillion verions of "ls" floating around, and there's no consistency between them.

[Martin]

You have to pipe things with linux anyway though. Yes, there's an ls -la, but what if I want to sort it by date modified or something like that?

The point is, Microsoft won't make something as commonly used as ls be 30 characters long.

[rizzix]

c'mon u can't agure.... msh is not as good as the unix shells thats for sure.. i mean just look at zsh... i perticularly like it.. very customizable.. perfect interactive shell.

[wtd]

Customizability isn't even the key issue.

Yes, a good shell should be customizable, but it also needs to have enough functionality "out of the box" that one need not customize it to perform common tasks.

If you do that, then as mentioned you end up with a huge number of disparate solutions being created to address the same problem. This is the danger of building tools at too high a level.

[Martin]

I don't see what makes you guys think it won't have functionality right out of the box...

[wtd]

Microsoft's own statements that their focus is on creating a "platform", rather than specific tools.

MSH gives people all the tools they need to create a perfectly suitable "ls". I don't see why they'd go to any further effort.