What's new on Windows 10 CMD

WHAT’S NEW?

So what’s new? According to Microsoft, they’ve improved the call interface to make the following things work correctly (along with many others):

• Core tools: apt, sed, grep, awk, top, tmux, ssh, scp, etc.
• Shells: Bash, zsh, fish, etc.
• Dev tools: vim, emacs, nano, git, gdb, etc.
• Languages & platforms: Node.js & npm, Ruby & Gems, Java & Maven, Python & Pip, C/C++, C# &
• .NET Core & Nuget, Go, Rust, Haskell, Elixir/Erlang, etc.
• Systems & Services: sshd, Apache, lighttpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL

The changes to the console are mostly surrounding escape sequences, colors, and mouse support. The API changes included things like allowing certain non-administrative users to create symlinks. We’ve made X Windows work with Windows (using a third-party X server) and Microsoft acknowledges that it has been done. However, they still don’t support it officially.

WHY, WHY?

Linux follows — more or less — basic precepts set forth by the Unix operating system. While it has grown over time, Unix was built to run on computers that are not terribly different from a modern computer. True, the PDP-7 was an 18-bit computer but it didn’t have the stifling quasi-8 bit architecture that MSDOS grew up in. MSDOS, on the other hand, was battling quite a few hardware limitations. But MSDOS eventually got a shell called Windows. Then Windows turned the tables and became the operating system that could run MSDOS. But this led to a hodgepodge of issues, not the least of which is the shell was anemic. There have been several answers to this. Even back in MSDOS days, third-party shells like 4DOS were popular, not to mention Unix-like shells available with Cygwin, MKS, and similar tools. Modern Windows still has an anemic MSDOS shell, but also PowerShell and the WSL bash shell.

TERMINAL VELOCITY

There’s also a new Windows Terminal application to manage all the shells with tabs and font support for emoji — because apparently, that’s important. You can see a flashy commercial for it in the video below.

Between having so many browser-based applications and now having a bash shell on just about everything, it is getting where you almost don’t care what CPU you are using or even what operating system. While that’s good for us, it probably isn’t good for Microsoft. Perhaps they figure they make most of their money from corporations and think this strategy will stop corporate developers from adopting open operating systems? We aren’t sure it is all that great for Linux, either, as it dilutes one of its big advantages — a wide range of tools for serious users and developers.

source: hackaday.com