Why have so many different consoles? How are they all different?

Question

git

The first time I decided to build a front-end. I've never dealt with consoles before. I know that in any OS there is a command line (I have Windows). In general, with the installation of various components, I saw that in addition to the standard line, I had Node.js and Node.js command prompt consoles. Then I installed Git, which also has its own console. In one of the video tutorials, I was recommended ConEmu, which allows you to open consoles in tabs. In it, I opened the menu and saw that there are still many different options for consoles. Why such diversity, and what to do with it all?

Answer 1

The standard Windows console is very poor.
ConEmu offered just replacement solutions, and very convenient, especially in conjunction with FAR.
git offers not only a console, but also a very impressive set of utilities ported from Linux, since it was originally designed to work in Linux.
Node.js offers its own console to run its scripts.
Basically, all the problems grow from the fact that the native Windows console is terribly miserable, and MS does nothing about it. MS added a powershell, added functions to the scripting language itself, but the console itself was not brought to an adequate state, and even these some improvements have just begun to appear in the latest versions. This led to the fact that everyone is trying to offer their own solution.

Answer 2

What to do - decide for yourself. As for me, let the consoles remain, but you don’t need to use all of them at the same time.
And why do you need a large number - think for yourself. Windows console - for simple operations (create file, loop). Nodejs has its own console for errors, logs; in the end, what to do with the output of the program? You can also work with git through the Windows console, but the built-in console is similar to Bash and it is more convenient to work with git in it.

Answer 3

You do not complain that all window applications have their own interface, some have such a menu, others have this, some have bookmarks, others have toolbars, buttons like this, buttons like that.
And the console is the interface of console applications, one application has such commands, the other has some. That's the way it should be. Everything is good.

Answer 4

There are not so many consoles: standard Windows, mintty, ConEmu, ConsoleZ, Take Command. There are almost no other popular ones.
Many "environments": in fact, these are sets of set environment variables, primarily PATH. Each development environment, or shell, has its own set of executable files (compilers, utilities, etc.) that must be available to be called from the command line. In general, it is not possible to create an environment in which **all** development environments installed on the machine will run, because executable and variable names can move around.