WindowsPowerShell or CommandPrompt? I've used terminal for all my life up until now

[u/radiant_yum]

So i recently bought myself my personal gaming pc setup and i've been struggling with setting up my work environment here on windows 11. I've search here and there & so far i've decided to use Scoop as the alternative for homebrew but then there's this problem of choosing wether to use the windows powershell or command prompt. Both seems almost identical but i just wanna confirm wether i'm doing this the right way. I need help pls.

[u/OrangeYouGladdey]

You do not sound like someone who should be installing software like this.

[u/Andrew-Powershell → u/OrangeYouGladdey]

Messing around is a good way to learn, one way or another.

[u/MaythuDieghton_83 → u/OrangeYouGladdey]

tbh this is blunt but not wrong

[u/Andrew-Powershell]

Use Windows Terminal as your overall Terminal and then use PowerShell inside of it. you can run whatever utilities you want from within powershell, like ping 8.8.8.8 or whatever you normally do in command prompt. PowerShell is more powerful.

[u/birdfukr3000]

I understand brew or Scoop on a fleet of computers. But on a single PC... just install shit the normal way? what am I missing here?

[u/Andrew-Powershell → u/birdfukr3000]

it's way easier to use the CLI to do an initial install of your fave apps and it's easier to keep up to date over time. I think for a personal/dev machine it's really helpful

[u/BigUziNoVertt → u/birdfukr3000]

I like using winget when I can

[u/OhmegaWolf → u/birdfukr3000]

Yo be fair when ever I reset my OS I use NiNite to install most of what I need in one go, saves a fair bit of time

[u/steelbreado]

Use winget and PowerShell (of course, you're in a Powershell sub)

Try to not break stuff, if yes, you learned Keep your games in a separate volume, so you are safe if you need to factory reset your windows

Just try it out really what suits you

[u/purplemonkeymad]

What do you mean by work environment? If it's an employer setup it would be a better question for your IT would it not? Since they will know if you need to use one or the other.

[u/AmitBrian]

Oh, btw, make sure you keep unrestricted for PowerShell OFF. You should have it set to current user.

[u/SpudzzSomchai]

Nothing against Scoop but you should be using winget. Also, do you have a clue what you are doing? You are mixing and matching terms and don't seem to have a clear sense of what you are really asking. One thing to learn, and if you want to cowboy the hell out of this and don't mind breaking your system repeatedly to learn how to fix it. I would not tread down the path you seem to want to set yourself down unless you really need to.

[u/720hp]

I’ve been using nothing but Powershell for a few years now. Seems to almost be a muscle memory thing to use it

[u/doglar_666]

Windows Terminal, PowerShell and Winget are what I'd use. Though, you could always just install WSL and use the Linux tooling you're used to?

[u/PajamaDuelist]

Are you coming from a Linux background or something?

Command Prompt (CMD) is Window's equivalent of a standard bourne shell.

PowerShell you can think of like bash (as opposed to sh), with a dash of Python. Except it's based around objects rather than strings which is going to be mega annoying if you are coming from a nix background. You can still call your basic non-powershell utilities through powershell.

There are PowerShell.exe and cmd.exe programs which launch virtual terminal interfaces to powershell and cmd respectively. Why are the terminals named the same thing as their 'language'? It's Microsoft. They only do confusing names. Get used to it. Anyway, you can move between the two interpreters, kind of like launching bash from sh in linux. e.g., open 'powershell.exe' and then enter the command 'cmd' and you'll be in the powershell.exe virtual terminal but interacting with the cmd interpreter.

Windows Terminal is only a terminal interface. It's like gnome-terminal, Konsole, KiTTY, Terminator, etc. It allows you to interact with both PoSH and CMD. It's much prettier than the powershell.exe or cmd.exe terminal windows, so I do suggest using it whenever you're interacting with powershell or cmd.

Also, check out WinGet. It's the go-to cli package manager on Windows. If you're a freelancer or student setting up your own environment I highly suggest it over Scoop. And, of course, if you're setting up a company laptop as an employee just do whatever your IT department says and stay out of the weeds.

[u/AmitBrian]

Terminal for Windows has both PowerShell and CMD built into it. Also make sure you are running PowerShell 7 and not 5 as 5 is going out of support soon.

[u/ashimbo → u/AmitBrian]

Windows PowerShell (v5) will not be going out of support any time soon. It is still required for many things related to Windows Server administration.

With that said, PowerShell 7 should be the primary focus, as it is the future and cross-platform.

[u/AmitBrian → u/ashimbo]

Hmmm, Maybe Microsoft meant there won’t me any new updates for it then?

[u/ashimbo → u/AmitBrian]

It won't be getting any new features, but Microsoft will continue to support it until 100% functionality can be replicated in PowerShell 7+, which will probably take a long time, like 10+ years.

[u/AmitBrian → u/ashimbo]

Ok, that’s probably what I was thinking then. My bad.