this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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That's just dishonest.
Honestly, Windows MMC tools are one of the oldest and most dependable ways to:
Manage printers
View logs
Manage devices and drivers
Manage group policy
Manage MDT
The interface is almost 30 years old and it is prone to crash. Microsoft cannot seem to rewrite tools that replace the snap-ins.
There are some alternatives, such as diskpart to replace diskmanagement, but nobody is talking about replacing devmgmt with PowerShell or regedit with PowerShell for reg commands for the one off or the lay user.
Also, attempting to duplicate printmanagement with devices and printers has resulted in a loss of functionality for managing printer ports and drivers. Attempting to manage printers through just PowerShell is pure madness as you can't properly parse the vendor options.
If you have made it this far, thank you for hearing me out. I'm not sure I actually made a point, but I do feel better.
There are already PowerShell commands for reading searching and updating registry entries. I don't think anyone is replacing one with the other, though.
Devices and Printers in Windows can go to hell where it belongs.
I guess I wasn't clear. The average Windows user isn't aware of PowerShell and would hardly be able to use reg itself. I agree that it is a great tool for managing registry in an environment, but I have seen professional technicians darn near cry over using cd to traverse directories.
Hey, and PowerShell commands aren't GUI, bringing us back to the point of this post...
Yes, and I've ran in to several guides that have used the powershell regedit commands instead of the GUI. Not only do the commands already exist, but they're absolutely something some prefer over the GUI, even on Windows.
It's relevant. From about 1995 to 2006, Microsoft was pretty much hard set on 'cli is dumb, do nothing cli wise, cmd is a concession, but a crappy one'. As an artifact of that, you got regedit, a godawful 'GUI' that took a messy datastore model and just kept it ugly, in a way that would have been pretty much better as a CLI interface.
Microsoft started getting the idea again, but in true Microsoft fashion, had to reinvent the wheel and did PowerShell to try to create a CLI ecosystem from scratch rather than trying to build anything vaguely familiar. To their credit, for first party stuff they did a fine job enabling it, though third party applications remain a mess to this day. It does highlight that even Microsoft figured out that CLI actually does make sense a lot of the time.