PowerShell VS PowerToys

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

msiexec.exe /package https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.6/PowerShell-7.2.6-win-x64.msi /quiet ADD_EXPLORER_CONTEXT_MENU_OPENPOWERSHELL=1 ADD_FILE_CONTEXT_MENU_RUNPOWERSHELL=1 ENABLE_PSREMOTING=1 REGISTER_MANIFEST=1 USE_MU=1 ENABLE_MU=1 ADD_PATH=1

This smells like when PowerShell aliased curl and wget to a completely different command, with incompatible arguments.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901

PowerShell is available on macOS and Linux as well (source on Github: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell). It may not be as well-integrated with things like system services management, but the language still works well. You can still use all the command line tools you're used to on Linux, of course.

nushell does look interesting, though the lack of a .deb repository does put it pretty low on my to-do list.

Issue #7940 discusses potential improvements to array slicing.

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.

+1 for power toys

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

also, Cygwin if you need it

Obligatory FancyZones/PowerToys links:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys?tab=readme-ov-file

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

FancyZones is a Microsoft tiling window management utility from their PowerToys collection.

> If you're on Windows you should try the powertools OCR tool.

Which is open source (MIT-licensed), the source code is here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/main/src/modules...

It is written in C#, and uses the Windows.Media.Ocr UWP API to do the actual OCR part: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?... – so if your app runs on Windows it can potentially call the same API and get OCR for free

Apple provides OCR through VisionKit ImageAnalyzer API – https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... – albeit that is only officially supported to call from Swift (although apparently you can expose it to Objective C if your write a "proxy Swift framework"–a custom Swift framework that wraps the original and adds @objc everywhere). There is also the older VNRecognizeTextRequest API which is supported by Objective C, but its OCR quality is inferior.

I'm not sure what the best answer for Linux or Android is. I guess https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract ?

Microsoft PowerToys

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo

RunFlow is a cross-platform productivity tool which can launch apps and search files and more, that similar to Wox and PowerToys on Windows, and also similar like Alfred and Raycast on macOS. But we have differences with these tools, and we have our own unique new features. Right now, at the below, we will introduce you what features of RunFlow have been implemented in more details. It's an amazing journey, let's start.

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.

This is great work btw.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

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

[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...