Command Prompt will remain available in Windows 10 Creators Update

Yesterday, a new clarification was made by Microsoft. It explains the company's official position on the future of the Command Prompt and its modern successor, PowerShell. Many people misinterpreted the change being made in the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update and thought that Command Prompt was going to be completely removed.

As you may know already, Microsoft replaced Command Prompt with PowerShell in the Win + X menu and also in the context menu of File Explorer in recent Insider Preview builds. Their intention was only to make PowerShell more prominent and the default console but this caused many people to think that the Redmond giant was going to get rid of the good old cmd.exe app.

The official clarification came from Rich Turner, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, who curates the development of command line tools including PowerShell, Bash on Windows and everything related to them. He wrote a long post about the changes made to Insider Preview builds related to PowerShell and Command Prompt.

In short, he assured that the command prompt won't be removed. It will be available in Windows 10 Creators Update, which is expected to be released in April 2017:

The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pros around the world.

In fact:

• Much of the automated system that builds and tests Windows itself is a collection of many Cmd scripts that have been created over many years, without which we couldn’t build Windows itself!
• Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
• Many of our customers and partners are totally dependent on Cmd, and all it’s quirks, for their companies' existence!

In short: Cmd is an absolutely vital feature of Windows and, until there’s almost nobody running Cmd scripts or tools, Cmd will remain within Windows.

However, PowerShell will become the default option in File Explorer's context menu and in the Win+X menu. To revert this change, you will need to perform a number of steps, as described in the following article:

• Add Command Prompt to Context Menu in Windows 10 Creators Update
• Add Command Prompt back to Win+X Menu in Windows 10 Creators Update
• Remove Open PowerShell window here from Context Menu in Windows 10

PowerShell is being made the default in order to provide IT admins the ability to launch it as their default shell. PowerShell is a newer and extensible product built for the future, while the command prompt is old and can't be improved.

We’ve gotten to the point with Cmd that we can no longer easily make improvements, enhancements or modifications to it! On the very rare occasions where we do make a fix, or change something, we generally break someone in the real world whose scripts/tools depend on that legacy feature/behavior. The last thing we want to do is break the Windows build system (that team get really upset when we break them 😉), or worse, break a PC OEM’s production line, or damage a farm equipment manufacturer’s welding robots, or prevent an enterprise’s 150,000+ employees from logging-in to their PCs in the morning! This also means it is tricky to add new usability features such as auto-complete, color highlighting, etc.: If we change Cmd, we tend to break someone!

Cmd will remain as a legacy tool whole PowerShell becomes the recommended console to use for those who do not depend on Cmd.

What do you think about this change made in Windows 10 Creators Update? Do you prefer PowerShell over the Command Prompt app?

You can read the entire post by Rich Turner HERE.