I built a service whose primary client is a CLI program. I was thinking about building that client for Windows as well (not just WSL). My target users are generally technically-proficient so I’d rather not build a whole GUI app if it’s unnecessary. But I honestly have no idea how often Windows users use CLI tools beyond some Windows admin stuff.
So if Windows is your daily driver, how often do you leverage the shell and how unusual would it be to use CLI tools in your workflows?


If I’m on a windows box by order of preference wsl, cygwin, PowerShell, console. There’s no package manager so I use either chocolatey or the cygwin packages.
There is winget, which is built into newer Windows. You can install a decent amount of stuff using it. I have a setup script for setting up my OpenRGB development environment that uses winget to pull down MSVC build tools and libraries, 7-zip, and more.