I can recommend console2+powershell. Powershell is basically bash but with object pipes instead of character pipes. It's all built on top of dotnet, so if you're familiar with c# you should feel at home with the API.
to kill all instances of internet explorer. The `ps` command outputs System.IO.Process objects. The ? { ... } syntax is a filter, inside which you can use $_ to refer to the element you're matching. You can access the 'Name' property directly and use -match to match it against an expression. Finally the % { ... } syntax executes some code on every element, in this case it calls System.IO.Process.Kill() to kill the process.
Console2 puts a nice face on things and supports tabbing and resizing, as you would expect from a usable terminal window.
I was working with this configuration for some time and it is really nice if you're satisfied with life inside MS's walled garden. The problem is that there is absolutely no interoperability with standard *nix tools. What's worse, PowerShell pretends that there is - `ps` in your example is just an alias for 'Get-Process' cmdlet, the same is true for cat, ls and other things.
Aside from that PowerShell is really solid shell. You can extend it with C# code and you get access to many .NET feature both in the command prompt and from PowerShell scripts. The scripts are quite nice for a shell scripts, it offers a few built-in data structures like arrays and hashes, there is a quite good autocompletion, even for .NET classes and objects and so on.
I love Console2. Be advised that it doesn't play nice with some things (or maybe the other way around?). I downloaded less for windows [1] yesterday and it completely hosed the terminal (changed all the colors and made the window ~10px wide and taller than my resolution).
Thinking back on it I'm not terribly surprised this happened given what Console2 is.
You may also like ConEmu (http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/). I switched to it from Console2 a few months ago and like it better - it has more customisation options and features like being able to move the cursor by clicking, administrator terminal in a tab, and the double-click to select a word thing that I constantly missed with Console2.
You can do stuff like
to kill all instances of internet explorer. The `ps` command outputs System.IO.Process objects. The ? { ... } syntax is a filter, inside which you can use $_ to refer to the element you're matching. You can access the 'Name' property directly and use -match to match it against an expression. Finally the % { ... } syntax executes some code on every element, in this case it calls System.IO.Process.Kill() to kill the process.Console2 puts a nice face on things and supports tabbing and resizing, as you would expect from a usable terminal window.