Linux-flavored Windows

http://eamann.com/tech/linux-flavored-windows/

by eamann • 13 years ago

41 48 13 years ago

pistle• 13 years ago

Powershell

eamann2• 13 years ago

I enjoy Powershell as well, but the Basic-style command structure is a bit frustrating. Particularly when trying to achieve parity between a Windows "shell", a Linux shell, and a Mac terminal "shell." Comma-delimited args in commands don't fit the bill there.

shadowfox2• 13 years ago

Comma-delimited args in commands

Not quite sure what you mean.You don't need to use comma unless you explicitly want an array of values. So for example a rather simplistic cmdlet/function like this,

  Function Foo([string] $text, [int] $count) {
    #Produce repeated text
    $text * $count
  }

can be called in any of the following ways:

  Foo "ab" 3    ---> "ababab"
  Foo -text a -count 3 --> "ababab"
  Foo -t a -c 3   ---> "ababab" [Automatically disambiguated]

And we are not even using features of cmdlets like parameter aliasing.

Maybe I understood your concern wrong?

Leszek• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what problems the author had with Cygwin that he didn't with Git's msys environment. I'm not denying that there were problems, I'm just curious what they were.

acqq• 13 years ago

I guess the problems come once anybody tries to mix the environments at once: Git installs msys, the user additionally installs Cygwin and if both are in the path the confusion is certain.

Roboprog• 13 years ago

Is there a problem simply using the version of git that comes with Cygwin? Seems to work for me.

drzaiusapelord2• 13 years ago

This is a weird article. It ignores powershell entirely and I really disagree about cygwin being this bloaty and difficult thing to install. If you just want basic unix utilities then cygwin is a breeze to install and use.

On top of it, you can download compilations of standard gnu unix untils at sourceforge compiled for windows. I have a standard unixutils folder on the c: root of the drive of all my computers so I can easily access stuff like wget, netcat, grep, etc. Works well enough.

eamann2• 13 years ago

Scripting in Powershell is nothing like scripting in Bash. I like and use Powershell on a daily basis - but can't re-use my PS scripts on a Mac because the shells are nothing alike. The point was to achieve OS parity.

For a newcomer, no, Cygwin is not a breeze to install and use. The documentation is abysmal, the download takes forever (unless you know ahead of time which tools to install and which to omit), knowing which packages to install to enable specific features is impossible for someone without experience, and there is no native uninstaller.

drzaiusapelord2• 13 years ago

Why is this person even bothering to use windows instead of running a unixy desktop plus wine or Windows in a VM? For your requirements, its asinine to buy a windows box. If you're working in windows, might as well spend 20 minutes learning the basics of powershell. Not sure why this is a controversial suggestion. Leave windows if its all too bothersome.

csmuk3• 13 years ago

Agree, apart from PowerShell which is a bastardised mutant crawling snail spawn of satan. It's like using a VAX 11/780 over a 300bps dialup. SMS messages have a higher throughput.

This is almost entirely because it uses the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection.

nailer4• 13 years ago

the CLR which has terrible inefficiency due to immutable strings, the CLR startup time and insane cost of reflection

That's true, PowerShell is slower than bash. It does more, and that has a cost.

That said: it's by far the best designed shell in terms of syntax, and actually separating presentation from logic.

Eg, print me a list of processes started in the last hour (from memory, I don't normally use Windows)

    ps | ? StartTime -gt $1HourAgo | kill

Notice the lack of silly things like creating regexs to represent time?

Unix shells are MS Word. Powershell is LaTeX.

runjake2• 13 years ago

It's not a weird article at all. And from what you posted, you didn't even read it.

The author mentioned in the very beginning of the article that they wanted something that would work cleanly across their other (*NIX) platforms. Powershell, while fantastic, is not cross-platform.

And Cygwin does some funny stuff that also makes client configuration a bit of extra work if you're, again, dealing with multiple platforms.

joemi• 13 years ago

To be pedantic, the article mentions that he's using "the Windows command line", and not Bash. So Powershell's non-cross-platformness does not seem to be breaking his goals any more than that.

mmagin• 13 years ago

For me, what's horrible about Cygwin is that a lot of things that perform just fine on a normal Unix are horribly slow. Just try running an Autoconf "configure" script sometime. I'm told this is because emulating fork() is very expensive in Windows (in contrast to the Unix model where it's very cheap.)

bliker• 13 years ago

<shameless plug> You can get pretty good working enviroment using msysgit + clink + conemu. It takes a while to set all up.

For the lazy there is http://bliker.github.io/cmder

Touche• 13 years ago

That looks amazing.

druiid• 13 years ago

That is pretty great. Thanks for the link! Would be cool to also have an installer option but it's also nice being able to stick it on a USB device.

Delmania• 13 years ago

Why not throw Chocolatey in there as well for quasi package management?

thatthatis• 13 years ago

I've been fine for years with just adding MSLS when I have to use the widows command line. http://utools.com/msls.htm

I agree that this is a weird article, but I also like the idea of adding the git bin to path. I'm going to try that.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

What I would like to see is Windows-like or Mac-like Linux environment or distribution. Not everyone wants and needs to know computer and it's OS inside out, and those people have no place in Linux world, only Windows and Mac. You do need to carry knowledge and unnecessary labor that needs to be done and unwanted information that needs to be absorbed in order to work with Linux is inadequate and unacceptable.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

That's more or less what Ubuntu is.

the_af• 13 years ago

I use Ubuntu on the desktop without knowing the OS or my computer inside out. Just like when I used Windows years ago, every time I have a problem I google it or figure it out. Occasionally I struggle with a problem I can't find how to solve -- exactly like I remember it used to be with Windows.

If Ubuntu is not your cup of tea, there are other user-friendly distros.

davexunit2• 13 years ago

You clearly have no clue about the state of GNU/Linux. So sick of seeing this stuff reiterated so many times.

shadowfox2• 13 years ago

Perhaps you can explain?

vondur• 13 years ago

Seems like it would be easier to just install Linux in a VM for your Unix work, or a Windows VM under a Linux host.

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

I hate developing in windows because of the command line. This actually improves it quite a bit :)

dagurp• 13 years ago

So GnuWin32 is included with git then?

jackgill• 13 years ago

Also worth mentioning is the GnuWin32 project (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/). It provides native Windows builds of many GNU utilities, including a few handy ones missing from the Git distribution like file and wget.

If you're serious about using Vim on Windows, check out gvim (http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc) which adds some nice Windows integration.

I would also echo the author's point about avoiding Cygwin. It gives you the worst of both worlds: you can't access Windows facilities, and many Linux programs don't quite work right. By far a better solution is to use a native Windows shell (Powershell) together with native Windows builds of various GNU utilities (from a Git install, GnuWin32, MinGW, etc). Powershell gives you fluent access to a wide variety of Windows-specific API's, and you don't have to sacrifice the convenience of a Linux command line environment.

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

I use GnuWin32 and I'm pretty happy with it:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

DISCLAIMER: I just copy/pasted the steps to install GnuWin32 from a text file with instructions that meets my needs. This means that I deliberately did things that the documentation doesn't recommend (setx /M PATH...), so I suggest to read the documentation first.

  download.bat
  install.bat C:\GnuWin32
  xcopy /i /e /c "C:\GnuWin32\Start Menu" "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\GnuWin32"
  setx /M INFOPATH C:\GnuWin32\info
  setx /M WGETRC C:\GnuWin32\etc\wgetrc
  setx /M A2PS_CONFIG C:\GnuWin32\etc\a2ps.cfg
  setx TEMP ^%USERPROFILE^%\AppData\Local\Temp
  setx TMP ^%USERPROFILE^%\AppData\Local\Temp
  setx TMPDIR ^%USERPROFILE^%\AppData\Local\Temp
  setx /M LANG EN
  setx /M LANGUAGE EN
  setx /M PATH "C:\GnuWin32;%PATH%

angersock2• 13 years ago

GnuWin32 makes the default command-line shell a bit more bearable...it sadly is still no replacement for a competent bash. Msys Git does a good job there.

I still would recommend it as a "Good Thing" to have, much like sysinternals ( technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/‎ ) if you're on Windows.

davexunit2• 13 years ago

Just use GNU/Linux!

powertower• 13 years ago

This is the link to the environment - https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit

It's kind of like some of this with some other stuff thrown in -

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/

techtivist• 13 years ago

I would prefer a Windows-flavored Linux tbh ;)

Cogito• 13 years ago

As others have pointed out, the reason why this works is that Git for Windows is bundled with msys.

You could achieve the same ends by installing msys standalone, but I guess many already have Git for Windows so this is a simpler path.

The key benefits msys has over cygwin, from my experience, are how lightweight it is, and how easy and fast it is to set up. I wrangled with cygwin for far too long (for no good purpose) before switching to msys and then GNU/Linux.

be5invis• 13 years ago

The ssh bundled with Git is not a good port. It still uses ANSI version console API which mess up non-English characters. Note that there ARE APIs (like WriteConsoleW) supporting Unicode and produces nice multilingual output.

Maybe I have to remake a ssh using Node. Node has a NICE tty port.

zokier• 13 years ago

First, you don't need to modify path, you can just open and use the "git bash" (which is just the bundled bash configured with git in path) for everything. It even has convenient shell-extension to open it in arbitrary directories.

Secondly, if you like MSYS (which is the environment bundled with git usually), then you can just download it directly. That way you can choose which tools you'll want, and stay up-to-date.

edit: interesting how many people seem to be more familiar with gnuwin32 than msys, considering that gnuwin32 seems pretty dead as a project and never was as comprehensive as msys.

Linux-flavored Windows

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