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Ask HN: Are there no shells for Windows other than PowerShell and CMD?

11 points by piuvas ↗ HN
And I don't mean terminal emulators, because I know Console Host, WT, Kitty, Alacritty. I mean shells like bash, zsh.

How come there are so many alternatives for linux but none for Windows?

Nothing against PowerShell, I'm just curious.

22 comments

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metadat
What classification does Cygwin fall under?

It can run most or all of the widespread *nix shells.

cloudking
You can get Linux shells and environments in Windows via WSL https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
pixl97
Yep, WSL is the way to go, specifically WSL2 if you want more IO performance.

Very convenient on my work laptop where I can't replace the OS.

naikrovek
bash, zsh, ksh, etc., those aren't shells for Windows, though, are they?
cloudking
WSL makes it possible, you can interact with the Linux and Windows filesystems interchangeably
naikrovek
i know, but that isn’t really what i’m getting at.
pixl97
The distinction is kind of meaningless. If you want an extensible shell in windows you're either using powershell (which I have come to quite like) or you can use any of the Linux shells that exist via WSL. Native shells just were not a thing for the longest time as the type of user that wanted that tended to go to Linux.
anigbrowl
Way back when there were a few substitutes for command.com, but none of them offered sufficiently utility to gain traction outside of the IT department. And since it's now trivially easy to run a unix virtual machine and do your command line stuff there if you want, I'm not sure there's much inventive to develop alternatives.
andrewf
There's 4DOS descendent Take Command: https://jpsoft.com/
BiggsHoson
+1 for Take Command. I've used it since its mid-90s iteration, and still use it nearly every day. It has a great mix of command prompt features and batch file language enhancements.
Kukumber
I personally don't count powershell as a shell, it's more like an interpreted/jit compiled .net interactive CLI 'shell', hence why it is slow to start and to run

A shell is a program that takes your commands and send them to the OS, it doesn't compile anything

naikrovek
a shell is what you type your commands into. a shell interprets those commands, pipes between them, and to and from file handles, and acts as the interface between the human and the things they want to do.

bash is FAR slower than PowerShell, and it's interpreted.

Kukumber
> bash is FAR slower than PowerShell, and it's interpreted.

That's not true at all

I have a demonstration that's very telling:

    time pwsh

    time bash
Post your result

It's sad that nowadays people do not understand the purpose of a shell

pixl97
This really sounds like shell gatekeeping touching on the no true Scotsman fallacy.

The purpose of the shell, to me, is to

1. Remote management/system administration. 2. Application execution 3. Data modification in situ

And powershell does all 3 for me.

Lastly just typing bash/pwsh is a useless benchmark as I can make both run at wildly different speeds (bash .profile modification and pwsh -noprofile loading)

Kukumber
I never said you should not use it, i'm not gatekeeping

I only state a fact, you pick what you want that empowers you to do great things

But i'm not going to ignore wrong claims, it lowers the standard of quality we should expect from the tools we create, share and use

delta_p_delta_x
Why not PowerShell, though? If you ever want to directly administer Windows through the command-line, PowerShell is increasingly your only bet, as older CMD executables are deprecated.

I'll suffix with my opinion that PowerShell is much nicer than many POSIX shells, especially given its hybrid object-oriented + functional pipeline paradigm.

pixl97
And following on this, for the longest time Windows only had extremely limited ability to manage itself via the command line and things were very haphazard on how you could manage them on the CLI. You were probably just using the CLI to edit the registry and restart serivces/executables at the best case.

This is really the reason there are no shells for windows. There wasn't anything for the shell to do! No massive collection of small executables linux *nix that were shell oriented. No system design around CLI management.

Around Windows 2016 or so I would say this changed with Powershell and with a number of design changes by Microsoft that allowed much better remote management (and not fully depending on GPO to do it), and I even run into some customers that have headless windows servers these days.

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runjake
There's plenty. Do more research.

- WSL -> Bash (Best, IMHO)

- Cygwin (old, slow IMHO)

- Git Bash (essentially includes bash for windows with a bunch of the more popular add-ons.

But, PowerShell is a pretty great shell, too. Make sure you're running the latest 7.x version, as it's improved tons.