Hyper 3 Canary 8 starts outdated 'cmd' shell by default on Windows

[mikemaccana]

Heya! Hyper 3 Canary 8 on a new box will start 'cmd' by default. It took a moment to realise this as various pwsh commands kept failing.

• Windows current default shell is Powershell (hit Win+X)
• Powershell is actively maintained and frequently updated - cmd is unlikely to get any fixes in future, @bitcrazed can fill you in on the specifics!
• Powershell is available on all Windows versions Hyper supports
• Powershell is more capable than cmd, with structured output so you can pipe things to select, where etc. rather than having to scrape thngs with regexs
• Terminus, Fluent Terminal, and other current tech terminals all look for and start Powershell by default

Ideally Hyper would look for powershell pwsh in $env:ProgramFiles'.\Powershell\<verson>, and fallback to powershell (included in Windows) if not found.

[stijnherreman]

Powershell is actively maintained and frequently updated - cmd is unlikely to get any fixes in future

What makes you say that? cmd has been massively improved over the past couple years, after being mostly untouched for decades. Am I misunderstanding something?

[bitcrazed]

"What makes you say that?"

I own the Windows Command-Line, inc. Cmd, and Console

"cmd has been massively improved over the past couple years"

Cmd (cmd.exe), (like PowerShell, bask, fish, zsh, etc.) is a shell. Shells performs the commands you type.

Windows Console (conhost.exe) is the UI application that you use to type commands into a shell or command-line application. Whether you run Cmd or PowerShell, or WSL, or ping.exe, etc., they all run attached to a Console application instance into which you type commands, and through which you view their output.

Please read my series of articles on this, starting here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-backgrounder/