8 Features that are new in Windows 10's Command Prompt & PowerShell?

Windows 10 brought many new features and improvements when compared to Microsoft's previous operating systems. Among them, the two command line tools loved by many geeks and IT professionals also got overhauled. You've guessed it: we're talking about Command Prompt and PowerShell. But what exactly did Microsoft do for these two tools? Read this article to find out out which are the most important new features, improvements and changes they received:

What's new in Windows 10's Command Prompt and PowerShell?

Both the Command Prompt and PowerShell are very useful and powerful command line tools. Fortunately, while developing Windows 10, Microsoft worked on bringing new features and improvements that enhance the way these two command line apps look and work. Here's what's new:

  1. You can resize the Command Prompt and the PowerShell windows: To resize them, all you have to do is click and drag any border or corner of their windows, just like you would do on any other window.
  2. You can maximize the Command Prompt and PowerShell windows: To do this, click or tap on the Maximize button from the top right corner of the app's window, or simply double click/tap on the title border.
  3. You can snap the Command Prompt and PowerShell windows: Snap the window to the top side of the screen and it will be maximized. Snap it to the left or to the right side of the screen and the window will automatically resize to take a full half of the screen.
  1. Command Prompt and PowerShell can be used in fullscreen mode: If maximizing their windows doesn't suffice and you'd prefer using these apps in fullscreen mode, you can do that by pressing the F11 key or by using the Alt + Enter keyboard combination.
  2. There are a lot more keyboard commands available: A lot more than in any of Command Prompt's or PowerShell's previous versions. And they now finally allow us to use the default Windows copy / paste keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
  3. Both Command Prompt and PowerShell can filter clipboard contents on paste: That means unsupported characters are automatically converted or removed. A good example of characters that convert automatically are the curly quotation marks that change into regular quotes when pasted.
  1. Both the Command Prompt and Powershell support line wrapping selection: In their previous versions, you could select text from inside these apps' windows only in block mode, which meant th at each time you pasted content from Command Prompt or from PowerShell, in a text editor, you had to manually correct tabs, word wrapping, etc. Enabling line wrapping selection means Windows 10 takes care of all that, so you won't have to correct the flow of text anymore.
  1. Both the Command Prompt and PowerShell windows can be set to be transparent: Their windows can be set to any opacity level between 30% to 100%.

How to enable and use all the new features from the Command Prompt And PowerShell

We've already published a few articles about the new features and improvements found in Windows 10's Command Prompt. If you want to know more about them, how to enable them, and also how to take advantage of them, these guides can help:

And, if you'd like to learn even more about the Command Prompt , PowerShell and some of the most useful commands and tasks these two apps can help you run and do, we have quite a few guides and tutorials that are worth checking out:


Before you close this guide, test some of the new features that are offered by Command Prompt and PowerShell , and let us know what you think. Are they any good? Are there any features that you want to be added in the future? Don't hesitate to comment below.