Options to select output? Sounds like advice from the Rule of Silence.
But.
- People above were just complaining about having to use sed to tweak output. I don't see why they would prefer a built-in filter to an external one. The external filter is far more flexible, and if that isn't enough, you can replace it.
- I'm generally not a fan of applications that tailor their output to what they think the human wants. Unless there is a deeply compelling reason, I want to see the same output on pts/0 as something down the pipeline. The reason for this is that picking up environmental hints to serve as implicit configuration is hacky, subject to error and and can later be the cause of really difficult-to-find bugs.
Perhaps I'm just irredeemably brainwashed. If you like a typed command line, Redmond has your back. For me, wanting types is a signal that I should start considering whatever little shell hack I'm working on complex enough to take it to a language that wasn't designed for ad hoc interactive use.
And at the same time, I really, very much do not want my command line to look like C#.
I get that a lot of folks these days are mostly GUI users who maybe type a little at git or run test suites from the command line, and not much else. I get why things like Powershell are appealing to such folks[1]. But when the command line is your primary interface, strong typing and OO hoop-jumping is huge waste of cognitive energy.
I do feel that Unix, to a first approximation, got the balance somewhere close to right. Loose coupling with lot of shared commonalities instead of a rigid type system and nonexplicit magic works really well for me, and if tighter coupling is a good idea, then I'll build it.
[1] Why they want to radically change the command line instead of using their favorite language to do systems stuff from the comfort of wherever they spend most of their time, I do not get.