Honestly, after years of using Windows almost exclusively I’m still not a fan, whereas C# and Powershell have really impressed me.
Mind you, Windows works fine. I don’t think about it much. The hardware and screen resolution support is great as you’d expect. Mandatory reboots used to be bad but are much reduced now.
It’s just too GUI-focused and full of obscure corners and inconsistencies (ok, not much different from Linux). I miss poking around internals and setting up everything the way I like and trying different window managers. Ah, Linux.
My main actual issue is performance. (Don’t even get me started on the ads but at least you can easily turn them off.) The kernel might be ok, but anti-malware and search indexing and a dozen other processes constantly blasting away in the background take a notable toll. Search can be turned off, of course. In general, it feels a little sluggish.
You should not turn off the built-in Defender security scans. However, for developers they can be a huge pain because your project changes every time you edit and build, and the scanner scans the new files, over and over. If you feel confident that no baddies can sneak in there, you can exclude folders from the Defender scan.
Without fail, people who watch me work ask me about this when it pops up. Clipboard history is a super power that saves you so much window switching and cognitive overhead (where was that string again?) when you’re used to it.
Windows has it built in. Hit Windows-V instead of Ctrl-V and a little window with the history pops up. Select an entry and Enter pastes it, Shift-Enter pastes it without formatting.
There are plenty, of course. The ones I use constantly are
With version 2, the Windows Subsystem for Linux has become a gem. It’s easy to use and powerful. I’m not that experienced with it, so I’ll leave it at that, but you should definitely install it and try it out.
ripgrep is a better grep on any system, but Windows doesn’t even have grep, just the wonky sls, so ripgrep becomes a must have. Easy to install with a pre-built binary.
I’ve written about Ack before and how it’s better than grep. Ripgrep is similar but faster and easier to install. Try it out!
Powershell is a funny beast when you’re used to Bash. Believe it or not, though, I’ve become a fan. What I love about it is that it’s more of a “real” programming environment, while still being a very usable shell.
What makes it real programming environment?
-Verbose, -WhatIf.By the way, just ignore the Windows command prompt (cmd). It’s awful and pointless with Powershell being present by default. Sadly, it’s still used in many docs and tutorials.
Whole books have been written about Powershell, so below are simply my slighlty polished notes that I took when i learned something I wanted to remember or reference later. I hope the selection is useful to others coming from *Nix.
If you come from *Nix, you can start by using most of the basic shell commands you know like ls. Their equivalents have a different name in PS, but PS comes with pre-defined aliases mapping the nix names to the PS names.
Each Powershell function supports the “common parameters”, such as -Verbose. Full docs at help about_CommonParameters.
Dash-parameters can be abbreviated as long as they are unique, e.g. -re for -Recursive.
| Bash | Powershell |
|---|---|
| cat | gc (alias of Get-Content) |
| cut | No direct equivalent, but because PS passes typed objects through pipes, it’s rarely needed. See What is an equivalent of *Nix ‘cut’ command in Powershell? for some options. |
| find | gci -Recurse (alias of Get-ChildItem) |
| head | gc file \| select -first 10 |
| jq | Yes, PS can do much of what jq provides out of the box. Parse the JSON first with ConvertFrom-Json which gives you an object with the JSON’s structure. Then pipe that to whatever filter and transformation commands you need. |
| M- | Use $$ as an argument, it evaluates to the last token of the previous command. |
| .profile | The path to the equivalent file is in $profile. |
| sum | measure -sum |
| tail | gc -tail 10 |
| time | Measure-Command |
| uniq | Get-Unique |
| wc -l | measure -line |
| which | Get-Command (no alias; gc is used for Get-Content) |
| && | This one is annoying since it’s verbose and modifies global state: $ErrorActionPreference='Stop'; cmd1; cmd2 |
Pipe a collection to ?, alias of Where-Object, to filter it.
$clusters | ? { $_.status -eq 'running' }
Note the automatically defined variable $_ representing the current object.
Similarly, pipe a collection to %, alias of ForEach-Object, to do something with each member.
For the common case of iterating and selecting a property of each object, PS has a built-in shortcut: just access the property on the list. Super useful. That is, the two commands below are equivalent:
$clusters | % { $_.status }
$clusters.status
-contains is for collections, -like is for strings. But .Contains() is often easier.
POST or PUT the content of a file using Invoke-WebRequest: -Body (gc file.json)
Arrays:
$docCounts = new-object int[] $indexes.Length@() creates a new, empty, untyped one+= adds, but internally creates a new array, so slowSplitting strings: "".Split("str") splits by any character in the given string. To split by a whole string, use -split. It supports limiting the result size, too: -split "str", 2.
PSDrives is a file system provider similar to like Fuse.
get-psdrive
dir alias:
dir env:
New-PSDrive creates a new drive mapping.
New-PSDrive -name Foo -PSProvider FileSystem -Root c:\Demo
Get-Module # list loaded modules
Get-Module -ListAvailable # list all available modules
After loading one, see what commands it added:
Get-Command -Module <module>
Usually, PS objects have more properties than the shell shows. Use Get-Member, alias gm, to see them. It will also show methods and events. This is my first step to inspect an object returned from somewhere.
What if you want only one property of an object in a pipe expression? select pulls it out.
$addresses | select LastName
However, you’ll notice that you don’t get a string with the value of LastName, you get a new object with a single property LastName. This is so that you can select multiple properties. But often, you want a single property as a scalar, e.g., to pass it on to a command that takes string input, not object. select -ExpandProperty will do that:
> ($StackTrace | select Length).GetType().Name
PSCustomObject
> ($StackTrace | select -ExpandProperty Length).GetType().Name
Int32
At some point you will use the -Verbose switch but see no verbose output. Or you will not use the switch and see it. What’s happening is there’s a global variable VerbosePreference, and a few other similar ones, that controls this behavior. See help about_Preference_Variables.
You have no way of knowing what it’s set to without explicitly checking. Ugh. This is a really annoying example of global state.
| ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json -MaxDepth 20
Note the -MaxDepth: the default is only 3, meaning PS will skip all parts of the object structure that are more than three levels deep. That’s bound to omit parts of your data, leaving you wondering where the hell it is.
Generally, null is null and the empty string is the empty string. However, when function parameters or properties are annotated with types, like [string], Powershell tries to auto-convert argument to the given type. For some strange reason, $null becomes the empty string for [string] parameters. See this issue for details.
You need to use [NullString] to be explicit.
$c.Nodes[0].DonorHostname = $null
$c.Nodes[0].DonorHostname -eq $null
False
$c.Nodes[0].DonorHostname -eq ''
True
$c.Nodes[0].DonorHostname = [NullString]::Value
$c.Nodes[0].DonorHostname -eq $null
True