this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
1020 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
63 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You think this is easier to use than grep?
No, neither is easy to use. The second you have to use a terminal or command line you have completely lost the vast majority of people.
I agree, but are you then implying that the windows explorer file search is good? Have you ever used anything else?
I didn't say it was good, but it is easy to use compared to a terminal. It won't help you find your file, but it's somewhat intuitive to a novice user - you click around and open folders until you find something that looks like what you're after. It's not efficient, it's downright tedious, but it's at least easy to do.
It's all about the barrier to entry to novice users. Most users are novices, they're the majority of the market so they'll decide what the market leader is.
With the tab-completion in Powershell, for someone who doesn't know all the grep flags by heart, it might be easier to stumble through the options to find the ones you want without looking it up.
But it doesn't list them does it? With e.g. zsh I can have the list of flags alongside their explanation, which is not the case with PS I think? I think even bash has it on more recent distros (not entirely sure)
Looks like you can use Ctrl+Spacebar to open the "MenuComplete" function that should show you the different available options. I don't think you can get a direct list of the parameters that have explanations without using something like Get-Help though.
More info here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/shell/using-keyhandlers?view=powershell-7.4