Enhanced CMD.exe prompt

[jtnord]

Summary

Enhance CMD.exe with features found in modern shells.

Powershell is ok for scripting, but is a step too far for an everyday working shell. Using bash (either in wsl or via cygwin) causes issues as paths are not as expected when you invoke tools.

For example things missing are

• Ability to customize the prompt based on output of a program/script (e.g. powerline)
• GNU readline support

This is possible by third party extensions like https://github.com/mridgers/clink but it is not a supported solution.

Basic example

In the PROMPT I can see at a glance things like git branch/ kubernetes cluster / directory when you have multiple consoles open

Motivation

As a developer I often drop to the CMD.exe console to perform many tasks and have many consoles open at once when debugging / tracing applications.

Being able to efficiently use the CMD.exe benefits me by providing me with more contextual information so I am more efficient, and means I am less likely to delete the wrong kubernetes cluster.

[LuanVSO]

why PowerShell is not suitable for you?

[jtnord]

why PowerShell is not suitable for you?

It does bad things like curl is not curl, dir /s/b gives an error and basically everything is different.

as I said:

Powershell is ok for scripting, but is a step too far for an everyday working shell

[LuanVSO]

It does bad things like curl is not curl

unfortunately changing cmd in any way is a breaking change for someone and so the team responsible for it cannot/ are not interested in adding features to it. (see https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md#cmd and microsoft/terminal#217)