JP1 Remotes

On Youtube, I found a quite nice tutoriai on the Windows command line. It consists of 9 5-minutes videos. It is not "necessary" to go through all parts; I would recommend 1 to 5.

To clarify: I am not an advocate of using the command line for general work (in particularly not on Windows). However, there are reasons for advanced users to have fundamental skills and knowledge. Also Microsoft recognizes this: Many system administration utilities in Windows comes as command line versions only. They have also put a lot of effort into the successor of cmd.exe, called PowerShell. Not even Microsoft consider the command line as obsolete.

It can be noted that other OS than Windows have much more powerful command lines. (This is not OS advocacy!)

Well at first I thought this wasn't going to be of any use. Really CD, DIR, CLS, MKDIR, RMDIR, PATH ... I guess there are some people that didn't start in DOS, but otherwise I didn't expect to learn anything. but it was playing in the background, and all of a sudden I learned something new. I didn't know you could use the TAB button to autocomplete!!!! I wish I had known that for the last decade! My typing is terrible, as you've witnessed.

I'll give the rest of them a listen.

PowerShell is nice and great upgrade from cmd.exe, but it's still not a match to shells like Zsh or newer versions of Bash. On my Windows machine I have Cygwin with Zsh and a lot of other Unix/Linux utils installed which makes working with command line on Windows a lot better (at least for a power user). Of course PowerShell is not just an upgrade regarding command line editing capabilities but it's much more integrated with the OS, so some things can only be done in it.

I didn't watch the tutorials, but here's another tip, if it wasn't in the videos. When you have some directory opened in a Windows Explorer window, you can drag and drop some file or sub-directory from it into the command line which will insert the file path at the cursor position. So it's possible to type "cd " (with space) and then drag and drop a directory into the command line to enter its full path.