Fugato

I’m getting to like Windows PowerShell quite a lot. Specifically, I like it almost as much as I detest the smoldering pile of rank excrement it comes embedded in: that vile ol’ cmd.exe shell window.

Because cmd.exe, the perennial ball-and-chain of Windows command-line usage, still suffers — after all these years — from a host of ill-forgivable usability flaws:

• Drag-selection selects simply a rectangle of characters, instead of following the flow of text. Sometimes you want that; generally you don’t. There is no way to select text like every other text environment does (e.g. Notepad, most shell windows in Linux, etc.). Why?
• You can’t drag-resize the window horizontally! You have to open a properties dialog, select layout, and type in the new width in characters. Why?
• No keyboard shortcut for paste. Why?
• No keyboard shortcut for scrolling. You can enter a Scroll mode in which the arrow keys work. To do so, fumble for your mouse and right-click and select Scroll. In this mode, typing anything results only in a loud beep. You must press Esc to go back to typing mode — in the usability spirit of vi. Why?
• By default there is no scrollback buffer; what’s stored is simply what’s on the screen. If it’s gone off the top, it’s lost. You can set the buffer bigger than the window in Properties -> Layout, but it’s tiny by default. Windows takes up several hundred megabytes just for chugging along like the freight train it is, but here they really had to save a couple of dozen kilobytes. Why?
• To drag-select text to copy, I have to first right-click and select Mark. This is inconsistent with everything else, anywhere, and there’s no point: mouse dragging does nothing in the window otherwise, so there is no need to disambiguate drag-selection from anything. If I set “Quick-edit” mode in Properties, I can drag-select directly … but then the right-click context menu doesn’t work until I turn off Quick-edit mode. Why?

And that’s leaving out the paltry line-editing functionality and weak scripting support, as compared to Unix shells. At least Windows PowerShell does something about those.

cmd.exe is so bad that once it has broken your spirit you actually marvel at the most minuscule hints of convenience in it: “Ho! F7 triggers a pop-up window with the command history. Boy, I just can’t believe how I have been able to never see that before!”

Detecting a novel feel on the skin of his back, the slave asks his driver: “Hey, is that a new cat-o’-nine-tails? How silky smooth it is!”

It is a real shame that the very promising innovation that is Windows PowerShell has to be marred by being encased in this anachronistic usability disaster.

After a decade and then some, why must Microsoft’s only command-line console still feel like a botched freshman programming assignment?

I meant that as a rhetorical question, but here’s one possible answer:

Guy in Microsoft Command Shell Development:

The best way to scroll a console is:
Alt-Space, E, L

<ESC> or <Enter> exits this mode.

Along those same lines, a quick way to paste is:
Alt-Space, E, P

User:

! that is four (4) keys :(
i think i’ll stick with the mouse until this gets improved…

thanks anyway

cmd.exe guy:

It actually becomes ingrained quite quickly as a single action. Ask anybody who’s spent any time using Emacs or VI how quickly these things become second nature!

And here I thought I was joking that vi was cmd.exe‘s role model of acceptable usability.

Okay, I’m done; I feel better now.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Rant, Tech, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.