tl;dr – Microsoft open sourced Powershell. Source, installable packages, and instructions for installing it or building the repository are on Github.

In case you missed it, Microsoft has open sourced its Powershell “super” shell. Right now it’s an alpha release, with all that that implies. And for those who care about such things, it’s released with the MIT open source license, not GNU. You can either grab the sources via git and built it yourself or you can download pre-built installation binaries. I chose to the pre-built Mac installation package to quickly get something up and running. I don’t have a lot to add to the conversation at this point as I’m certainly no Powershell guru. But from what little I do know about Powershell, it all appears to work on my Mac. In the example shown here I’m running Powershell in iTerm2, a better alternative to Apple’s Terminal. Perhaps future releases will be able to create a shell without this intermediate step; it would be nice.

Since upgrading to Windows 10 it’s a tiny bit ironic that I’ve been spending a lot more time in Powershell than I have in prior versions of Windows. What probably pushed me towards Powershell was my eventual dissatisfaction with the Windows Linux Subsystem and its inclusion of bash. I am not a bash fan, and find little to like with any of the other Unix-like shells (csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, etc, etc). I’ve used all those other shells because that’s all you’ve got. I haven’t gotten excited about a shell since my days of using 4Dos on MSDOS and OS/2. I personally would like a common powerful shell environment across all my various operating systems, but somehow bash and its ilk are not it for me. Since source and instructions for building the repository are available, I’m toying with the idea of building Powershell on Arch Linux ARM for the Raspberry Pi. More to come on that, perhaps…