PowerShell VS PowerToys

"can" is doing some heavy lifting there, especially based on my experience with VSCodium (which by definition is forced to work within Microsoft's opinion of build systems)

Anyway, uh-huh:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github... -> https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github...

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github... -> https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github...

As a frame of reference, to build bash one only needs /bin/sh not a pre-built copy of bash itself https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/configure?h=...

I'll take this moment to point out that the PowerShell feels like a modern shell and is open source https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell (MIT license). If you want something more modern give it a try. Native support for JSON and XML and parallel streams.

That said, I'm glad to see another major release of Fish because it's for having option that we get evolution.

Download: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.4.5/PowerShell-7.4.5-win-x64.msi

PowerShell is so alien to an experienced bash/zsh/etc. user that it's an entirely different language not any kind of drop-in replacement. Its designers also refuse to add simple things to make the switch any easier (e.g. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/3316).

Not necessarily:

1. UNIX-compatibility aliases like "ls -> Get-ChildItem" and "cat -> Get-Content" are not defined in PowerShell on Linux or macOS. For a complete list of these, see the PowerShell source code[1] (look for "#if !UNIX").

2. A number of aliases from PowerShell ≤ 5.1 were removed in PowerShell Core (≥ 6.0), including the particularly annoying "curl -> Invoke-WebRequest" (conflicts with curl.exe) and "sc -> Set-Content" (conflicts with sc.exe).

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/8ea1598964590b...

and do a no-install copy-paste deployment of powershell 7 and modules. (I'm not saying you should do this instead of using Lua, just that you can).

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases

What's interesting about this vs. PowerToys Run is the "extensibility" aspect. Developers can create custom extensions that users can add using winget/MS Store. This feels very similar to Raycast and is something I miss whenever I switch to Windows. I know Raycast team is working to add Windows support but it's nice to see some competition.

Docs about creating an extension: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-...

Release notes: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/tag/v0.90.0

I've recently been learning about how fonts render based on subpixel layouts in monitor panels. Windows assumes that all panels use RGB layout, and their ClearType software will render fonts with that assumption in mind. Unfortunately, this leads to visible text fringing on new display types, like the alternative stripe pattern used on WOLED monitors, or the triangular pattern used on QD-OLED.

Some third-party tools exist to tweak how ClearType works, like MacType[1] or Better ClearType Tuner[2]. Unfortunately, these tools don't work in Chrome/electron, which seems to implement its own font rendering. Reading this, I guess that's through FreeType.

I hope that as new panel technologies start becoming more prevalent, that somebody takes the initiative to help define a standard for communicating subpixel layouts from displays to the graphics layer, which text (or graphics) rendering engines can then make use of to improve type hinting. I do see some efforts in that area from Blur Busters (the UFO Test guy), but still not much recognition from vendors.

Note I'm still learning about this topic, so please let me know if I've misspoken about any points here.

[1] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype

[2] https://github.com/bp2008/BetterClearTypeTuner

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

Example 1: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

Yeah think its a ClearType issue[0] specifically then

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

It's active again, they've open sourced and reinvested in it with new utilities.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

You can download the latest version of PowerToys from the official GitHub repository. Alternatively, my brother wrote a helpful guide on how to download and install the PowerToys tool on your Windows 11 PC.

Research on Trending GitHub Repository As this is my first blog post on dev.to, so I did some research on a trending Git Hub repository, and provide insights into its usefulness and features. I chose to explore Microsoft's PowerToys repository, which has gained significant traction in the developer community.