Originally posted: ZogBlog::road less traveled, on October 11th, 11:22a EST.
I was just reading the main feed, when I came across Dan Crevier's post on CMD.EXE. He points out some of the UI and functionality idiosyncrasies. I decided to on the subject.
This has always bugged me to no end. I too looked at the console alternatives - and found them sorely lacking. I'm waiting on Monad, and was greatly anticipating the talk that was scheduled to occur at the Microsoft Management Summit 2004. It was canceled at the last minute however, so I'm still waiting to see just what it brings.
You can change the color of the text and background, but the fonts are limited... and while the transparency thing is cool, the old UI really bugs me. . I've had long conversations with an MCS employee I work with (Jon Gross), and the excuse he provided (though I don't believe it) is that the UI is built into CMD.EXE and therefore the system-wide UI is ignored. What?! That's ludicrous.
Microsoft has largely ignored the command line for the last decade. The big mantra has always been build it into the GUI, CMD.EXE is irrelevant. Many of the most advanced features of UNIX are barely seen without delving into the shell (my favorite was csh).
I remember when I switched from Novell/Solaris 2.6 to Windows NT. The hardest thing to swallow was that there were no Hard Links. I've argued this for years (in fact it's one of the few arguments I won with Jon Gross), Virtual HD mounts into a root level folder (with the separate physical drive mounted in a subfolder) is not a hard link, in fact its obviously more related to a UNIX mount then anything else. Hard Links (coupled with long file name support) could have greatly reduced the anguish of DLL hell YEARS ago.
I'm glad that Microsoft is doing Monad (probably championed by the MSBUILD team), I just hope that bundled with WinFS... that it brings a true console to Windows.
For more info, Keith Devans (via google) links to the .NET show video about Monad.
// steve
posted @ Thursday, November 18, 2004 2:49 PM