A while back I wrote a post on how to customize your PowerShell prompt. Last week Tomas Restrepo posted an article on a PowerShell prompt that adds color and shortens the path in a more subtle way. I haven’t tried it out yet, but his prompt looks much better than what I’ve been using.
If you’re a long-time Windows user you might be worried that all this PowerShell stuff is starting to look a lot like Unix. Well, it is. Some of the folks on the PowerShell team have a Unix background and they’re bringing some of the best of Unix to Windows. The Unix world has more experience operating from the command line and so it’s wise to learn from them.
On the other hand, PowerShell is emphatically not bash for Windows. PowerShell is thoroughly object oriented and in that respect unlike any Unix shell. Also, PowerShell is strongly tied to Microsoft libraries, particularly .NET but also COM and WMI.