Can you elaborate on liking cmd.exe ?

In a nutshell, consistency; with simplicity coming a close second.

I've effectively been using the same shell for 30 years. From MSDOS through OS/2 through NT to now. I am very familiar with both is possibilities and its limitations. Whilst it has gained a few new extensions here and there over the years, they have come slowly, and been consistent with what has gone before.

Conversely, sit down at someone else's open *nix console and the first thing you need to do is work out which shell -- and which variant of that shell -- that is running. You then have to find out how it has been customised...

The problems with *nix shells, are:

• that there are so many of them;

  And there is no one stand-out leader, which means they all get used and that means that when you pick up someone else's code it may have dependencies on any or all of them.

• that they try to be programming environments in their own right;

  Many of them are capable enough to encourage people to use them to do quite sophisticated things; but none of them are really capable/maintainable enough for full application development, hence the popularity of proper scripting languages like Perl and similar.

• that they are so similar, but different;

  Subtle differences are the very worst thing for programmers and sysadmins to get to grips with.

• that they are so configurable;

  Sit down at any number of *nix programmer's setups and you'll never find two the same. Even if they favour the same shell.

  And take a *nix programmer out of his setup to a newly installed clean system and they will often be at sixs & sevens until they manage to reestablish at least a baseline of setup -- key mappings; ini-files for their favourite tools; personal aliases etc. -- they are comfortable with.

Many people will see one or more of these as advantages, but like sophisticated programmable editors, I've found that it is very easy to become overly dependent upon highly programmable shells.

cmd.exe is powerful enough to do most every day tasks; but not powerful enough to warrant trying to do anything sophisticated; therefore very few people attempt to. That means that any applications that require proper programming are written in proper programming languages, and that is a good thing IMO.

There is a far more powerful Windows shell available -- PowerShell -- but quite frankly, it drives me nuts. Have you ever read through someones CV where they've written it in normal English first, and then gone through it using a thesaurus and switched all the short words for the longest near synonym they could find in an attempt to make it seem "sophisticated". I think the design committee that came up with the PowerShell syntax were paid by the character.

I guess what I am saying means I'm making a virtue of limited choice. But, think about cars or motorbikes or even airplanes. If you can drive one car, you can pretty much jump into any other car anywhere in the world and drive it away. You may wash the screen instead of signaling your intended direction for the first few attempts; but the major controls all work the same way. Same can be said for the other two.