It tries, but I think ISE is super clunky and it's awkward to use. It lacks the simplicity of a bog-standard terminal while not adding features to balance out its clunkiness (akin to the difference between a text editor an IDE--the IDE had best add something I can use if I'm going to take the hit).
Could you expand why you find ISE clunky and awkward compared to standard terminal? I mean you can just type in stuff and get answers back with fairly minimal interference as far as I can tell, just like a regular terminal.
I would suggest you go look at iTerm2, because an example is worth all the words in the world. tmux integration, multiple panes in a window as well as tabs, easy buffer search, instant startup, everything.
A shell host should open and do its absolute utmost to get out of my way. ISE does not do this. It's just...it's what I expect 2008 Microsoft to think a terminal should be, lacking empathy for me as a user. And maybe that's intentional--maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe it's for mouse drivers who are forced to the CLI in extremity. But it's tasteless and it's hindering where it really must not be.
Those sound nice-to-have features, but (personally) I don't think the lack of those makes something "super clunky and awkward to use", especially in comparison to standard terminals. Do you think xterm is too super clunky because it lacks all the bells and whistles?
I still do not see where the lack of empathy and tastelessness is apparent in ISE.
I don't think xterm is clunky, no. It doesn't try to help me, but it also doesn't get in my way. iTerm2's feature set does not increase the friction of dealing with the shell inside of it. Literally every time I have to open up ISE, I go, "jesus, why the hell is it doing things?". The experience is just straight-up repellent. It's hard to really describe past "I'd rather click a mouse than use this." And that never happens elsewhere.
But anyway, your "nice to haves" are my "it's 2015, I'm not wasting my time with less." Microsoft's got more money than God, they can do something worth the time of day.
Honestly, I'm getting really interested in what you find so offensive in ISE. I mean, I can see it being not so great, but being straight out offensive I can't really understand. It is perfectly understandable if you don't like PowerShell (it is kinda weird). But ISE? The most different thing in it is a "fancy" tab-completion, and that hardly can be reason to so deep hatred.
And I'm not saying ISE is the best thing ever or anything, but it is a significant step up from conhost, and honestly not really lot worse than xterm in many ways.
Yes I see you are right, thanks for the clarification. The base Powershell.exe with a better window wrapper like cmdr actually should make a nice combination.
It's really too bad the limitation on the nicer ISE though. It does make a bad first impression coming from Linux, when trying to compile and run a simple interactive console app, trying to use ISE as a cmd.exe replacement.
