Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
I don’t think any of the UX problems you’re describing have been solved on any platform. If anything Windows is one of the better examples here, because I’ll be fucked if I can ever find a file on Android and don’t get me started with Linux.
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