And I don't mean terminal emulators, because I know Console Host, WT, Kitty, Alacritty. I mean shells like bash, zsh.<p>How come there are so many alternatives for linux but none for Windows?<p>Nothing against PowerShell, I'm just curious.
Why <i>not</i> PowerShell, though? If you ever want to directly administer Windows through the command-line, PowerShell is increasingly your only bet, as older CMD executables are deprecated.<p>I'll suffix with my opinion that PowerShell is <i>much</i> nicer than many POSIX shells, especially given its hybrid object-oriented + functional pipeline paradigm.
You can get Linux shells and environments in Windows via WSL <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install</a>
Way back when there were a few substitutes for command.com, but none of them offered sufficiently utility to gain traction outside of the IT department. And since it's now trivially easy to run a unix virtual machine and do your command line stuff there if you want, I'm not sure there's much inventive to develop alternatives.
There's plenty. Do more research.<p>- WSL -> Bash (Best, IMHO)<p>- Cygwin (old, slow IMHO)<p>- Git Bash (essentially includes bash for windows with a bunch of the more popular add-ons.<p>But, PowerShell is a pretty great shell, too. Make sure you're running the latest 7.x version, as it's improved tons.
I personally don't count powershell as a shell, it's more like an interpreted/jit compiled .net interactive CLI 'shell', hence why it is slow to start and to run<p>A shell is a program that takes your commands and send them to the OS, it doesn't compile anything