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I am surprised by this, as I have had the opposite experience. I moved from a windows to mac a few years back, adopted alot of the keyboard shortcuts and recen

I am surprised by this, as I have had the opposite experience. I moved from a windows to mac a few years back, adopted alot of the keyboard shortcuts and recently a few months ago back to windows primarily. I found that on a mac the same shortcuts I use in the terminal (readline bindings), I can use most everywhere (ctrl-a for line start/ ctrl-w to kill last word etc...). For the most part Vimium takes care of the browser. I have often found the windows shortcuts to be hidden an obscure. Alt+F4 is the defacto kill app on windows but trying to press it is inconvenient especially while Alt+tabbing through windows. I agree command and control can be confusing but they give you more range in keyboard shortcuts as a result. The windows 8 search (although an improvement over 7) is also medicore compared to OSX spotlight making it much easier to CMD+Tab and navigate to different apps. The least keyboard friendly part is certainly the windows cmd prompt where pasting is ALT+SPACE+E+P ... as opposed to CMD+V on OSX... not mention the lack of navigational shortcuts in the cmd prompt (kill back a word, kill rest of line etc...) The most frustrating part for me is windows shortcuts not being consistent throughout apps. In most of the windows CTRL+BACKSPACE will kill the last word but not in notepad? or most winform applications... Ctrl-F is find in most apps but "forward email" in outlook? I guess its really a matter of personal preference, but I think as far as keyboard shortcuts go, both OS's have plenty.

mattmanser 13y ago
You honestly can't compare the command prompt to anything else on windows. It's an absolute travesty, nothing works in the command prompt. None of the normal windows text functions works (ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-shift-left/right to copy, mouse copy or selection commands). Copy and Paste especially is an absolute travesty (although it's muscle memory to me these days) and I honestly don't know why they haven't fixed it yet. That and not being able to resize the window too. Nothing more frustrating than running a long running command and then the output wraps so it's unreadable, and you can't resize the screen. And the mouse screen resize simply doesn't work, you have to go through the whole rigmarole with the buffer size. It's simply a complete pile of shit. That they consistently bring it out is bizarre. They didn't even bother to fix it for powershell, which essentially just makes powershell a vast pile of crap as an exploration tool. As you can tell, the whole situation frustrates me a lot, it's a tool I use daily and that they leave it in such an abysmal state is frustrating. So don't judge windows shortcuts by it's console, for some reason they stubbornly refuse to upgrade it to behave like the sane text editor it should be.
- gcv 13y ago
  In my experience, even really good Windows administrators do not use the console. They know how to use it, but rarely do. Frustration with the Windows CLI is strictly an artifact of a Unix-user's culture shock. IOW, no one worth listening to is asking MS for a better command line.
  - cstejerean 13y ago
    Of course people don't use it. It's unusable for serious work. If they improved it you might find that people use it more often.
    - vertex-four 13y ago
      As someone who's admined Windows systems, the solution comes in the form of the Powershell ISE, installed on any modern Windows system. Essentially, a combination code editor and terminal for Powershell in a modern Windows interface. Nobody uses the default terminal (cmd.exe and systems built on top of it). There's alternatives, though, and at least one is pre-installed. Do you judge Linux's command-line capabilities by the usability of xterm?
      - mattmanser 13y ago
        Embarrassingly I only found this about 2 weeks ago after deciding to give powershell another shot, it is rather good I must admit. I just got in the habit of typing cmd/pow in start and hitting enter. One of the disadvantages of relying on HN for tech news, few MS stories apart from the occasional "new VS released"/"C# is awesome but lets rag on it anyway"/"wow, F# is great (no-one uses it)" stories. I seem to remember when powershell first came out the only way to manage the next generation exchange was through the CLI? Quite a few tools lost their GUIs for a little bit? 2008? Am I wrong? Are the GUIs back now? I lost contact with my sysadmin friend and have mainly been working with small companies since that tend to outsource everything to google apps so am completely out of touch on Windows sysadmin.
        13y ago

mattmanser 13y ago

You honestly can't compare the command prompt to anything else on windows. It's an absolute travesty, nothing works in the command prompt. None of the normal windows text functions works (ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-shift-left/right to copy, mouse copy or selection commands). Copy and Paste especially is an absolute travesty (although it's muscle memory to me these days) and I honestly don't know why they haven't fixed it yet. That and not being able to resize the window too. Nothing more frustrating than running a long running command and then the output wraps so it's unreadable, and you can't resize the screen. And the mouse screen resize simply doesn't work, you have to go through the whole rigmarole with the buffer size. It's simply a complete pile of shit. That they consistently bring it out is bizarre. They didn't even bother to fix it for powershell, which essentially just makes powershell a vast pile of crap as an exploration tool. As you can tell, the whole situation frustrates me a lot, it's a tool I use daily and that they leave it in such an abysmal state is frustrating. So don't judge windows shortcuts by it's console, for some reason they stubbornly refuse to upgrade it to behave like the sane text editor it should be.

gcv 13y ago
In my experience, even really good Windows administrators do not use the console. They know how to use it, but rarely do. Frustration with the Windows CLI is strictly an artifact of a Unix-user's culture shock. IOW, no one worth listening to is asking MS for a better command line.
- cstejerean 13y ago
  Of course people don't use it. It's unusable for serious work. If they improved it you might find that people use it more often.
  - vertex-four 13y ago
    As someone who's admined Windows systems, the solution comes in the form of the Powershell ISE, installed on any modern Windows system. Essentially, a combination code editor and terminal for Powershell in a modern Windows interface. Nobody uses the default terminal (cmd.exe and systems built on top of it). There's alternatives, though, and at least one is pre-installed. Do you judge Linux's command-line capabilities by the usability of xterm?
    - mattmanser 13y ago
      Embarrassingly I only found this about 2 weeks ago after deciding to give powershell another shot, it is rather good I must admit. I just got in the habit of typing cmd/pow in start and hitting enter. One of the disadvantages of relying on HN for tech news, few MS stories apart from the occasional "new VS released"/"C# is awesome but lets rag on it anyway"/"wow, F# is great (no-one uses it)" stories. I seem to remember when powershell first came out the only way to manage the next generation exchange was through the CLI? Quite a few tools lost their GUIs for a little bit? 2008? Am I wrong? Are the GUIs back now? I lost contact with my sysadmin friend and have mainly been working with small companies since that tend to outsource everything to google apps so am completely out of touch on Windows sysadmin.
      - 13y ago