Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Scratch the surface of Windows (and macOS), and you’ll find a command line console underneath, a lingering remnant of how these operating systems started out: as user-friendly graphical wrappers built on top of text-based, monochrome interfaces.
If you’re as old as I am, you might remember having to launch apps and games on a computer by typing out text commands, rather than pointing and clicking. The modern-day methods are much easier, of course, but the old ways are still available — and they’re actually still useful for multiple tasks, as the list below shows.
To begin with, Windows kept the Command Prompt utility as a reminder of its MS-DOS roots. That was later joined by PowerShell (Command Prompt with extras), and in the latest…