Babun – A new Windows shell

http://babun.github.io/

by blearyeyed • 12 years ago

180 108 12 years ago

babun.github.io

viraptor• 12 years ago

I was actually expecting a new GUI shell for the recent windows versions. I used to run bb4win in the w2k times, but it doesn't look like win 7/8 have any popular alternative shells available. Does anyone know of those?

DaemonHN• 12 years ago

I was also expecting a new GUI shell and used to run GeoShell and Litestep. I got somewhat excited and hoped that there might be a resurgence in the popularity of Windows shells but it seems like that time is gone for good now.

If I recall correctly, the Windows XP release managed to stabilize the Explorer shell quite a bit (compared to Win9x) which in turn decreased the demand for a lightweight, stable and customizable replacements.

math0ne2• 12 years ago

I believe lightstep is also working on windows 8 now.

qwerta• 12 years ago

There is nothing wrong with current shell. Who needs window resize or copy&paste anyway?

mattmanser2• 12 years ago

Now, now, be fair.

alt-space > e > p becomes pure muscle memory.

It's actually a really elegant key combination that I definitely did not have to look up 10 times before it stuck because no other program uses it.

And of course powershell, which doesn't Get-Have-The-Most-Over-Verbose-And-Stupid-Naming-Conventions-Ever and have a terrible language design that results in [console]::writeline("Powershell {0} being a complete farce", "not") solves a lot of these problems.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

You can resize a cmd shell in the properties, and as someone posted in a sister thread, turn on Quickedit to smooth out copy and paste.

Turning on tab completion requires some fiddling though (and I have no idea if it survives in newer version of Windows).

math0ne2• 12 years ago

Blackbox is working on windows 8. If you head over to deviant art you can find some shots of working setups on the Blackbox group: http://blackboxdesktop.deviantart.com/

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

That's a very fragmented community, there seems to be zipfiles of random builds of dubious origin flying everywhere. Where's the "upstream" source?

voltagex_3• 12 years ago

LiteStep seems to be active with development much easier to follow than BlackBox - https://github.com/lsdev/LiteStep

pyrocat• 12 years ago

Is there a centralized site for blackbox? I had trouble finding resources when installing on windows 7.

dbbolton• 12 years ago

KDE, but it's still fledgling on Windows: http://windows.kde.org/

vadskye• 12 years ago

I've been using ConEmu [0] for over a year now, and it's miles better than the default console. I actually spend a majority of my time in Windows in the console now.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/conemu/

orf• 12 years ago

Power shell?

ygra4• 12 years ago

They meant a replacement for Explorer as the GUI shell. Don't confuse the following things:

1. Command-line shell (cmd, PowerShell, bash, whatnot)

2. GUI shell / desktop environment (Explorer, Gnome, KDE)

3. Console host / terminal emulator (conhost, console2, conemu, xterm, ...)

Invariable all of those are referred to as »shell«, sometimes even by people who ought to know better. The linked site makes the same mistake. It's not a new shell for Windows, it's just zsh bundled with cygwin.

Artemis2• 12 years ago

A more mainstream alternative is cmder: https://bliker.github.io/cmder/

ihnorton3• 12 years ago

That looks like mostly a skin for conemu, no? I've desperately wanted to like conemu, but every time I use it something ends up broken in weird ways (hung tabs, garbled output).

bmj• 12 years ago

I agree. I really want to like it, but moving through history with the arrow keys can often crash that tab.

RobinBlk7• 12 years ago

Have you reported your problems? Thought no...

jmspring• 12 years ago

Lost me at "based on Cygwin".

Yes Cygwin brings some unix goodness, but it has enough warts that I avoid it.

MetaCosm• 12 years ago

Yep. Give me something built on msys anyday.

jhasse2• 12 years ago

Can you give some examples?

ihnorton3• 12 years ago

http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda

(not really Cygwin's "fault" per se, but it is what it is)

gareim2• 12 years ago

I almost got a 0 on a programming project for an intro to CS class because it compiled and ran perfectly fine on Windows, but segfaulted on Linux.

rossy• 12 years ago

I wish I knew why so many Windows devs hate Cygwin. It has some pretty poor default settings, but you can change your .bashrc just like on Linux, or ditch the whole thing and use zsh instead, which works out of the box with oh-my-zsh (it looks like Babun does this as well.) For me, Cygwin is a very comfortable environment for git, programming and basic file management.

It's also the only way to get Linux shells to run on Windows, since they all rely on fork(). Even MSYS is just a fork of Cygwin 1.5.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

I don't hate Cygwin, but anything using it should bill itself as "blah on top of Windows", not "blah for Windows".

(Or alongside if you want to say it that way.)

ihnorton3• 12 years ago

Another ^nix -> Windows package system is the pacman port available in msys2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/

msys2 has an impressive package list [1] and is almost [2] an amazing solution for mixed-platform projects.

[1] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages) [2] The one caveat is that it is still susceptible to the Cygwin BLODA problem whereby under certain conditions and software combinations, Windows becomes dangerously unstable after too many calls to fork.

bitwize• 12 years ago

And this is why I can't hate Microsoft. They've vastly improved over the past 20 years! Why, I remember when Windows became dangerously unstable when you did not properly release a GDI resource or passed the wrong things into RegisterClass...

jhasse2• 12 years ago

What has Microsoft to do with MSYS2?

malkia• 12 years ago

I tend to install absolutely the whole cygwin (32-bit and 64-bit in two different folders). Always use the stable, and install the debug, since it's easier this way. It's quite big (~20 gb each install - but that includes all debug symbols).

I'm using all the time Far Commander calling cygwin commands. Some of the commands are not "callable" since I'm not running Far Commander through bash.exe/sh.exe (it's possible but a bit unstable). For such cases when the cygwin command does not have .exe/.com/.bat extension I run it "sh -c cmd blah", or create shortcuts for most used commands:

  gitk.cmd (somewhere in my PATH)

  @start /B ash -c "DISPLAY=:0 exec /usr/bin/wish /usr/bin/%~n0 %*"

I also have this in the Startup folder:

  startxwin - 1>nul 2>nul

Tig is also awesome for git browsing.

felipesabino• 12 years ago

"on top of Cygwin"... So does it mean still no copy&paste?

runjake2• 12 years ago

Copy and paste work here.

sundvor• 12 years ago

Yes! Select the ctrl+shift+letter option in Keys, and you'll even have ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v working. That, and the console window auto adjusts to resized window makes for a great start for me. Not to mention the ctrl+scrollwheel or plus/minus for changing the font size. Kudos to the devs.

liveoneggs2• 12 years ago

install rxvt

hiphopyo2• 12 years ago

http://www.howtogeek.com/68511/how-to-improve-your-cygwin-ex...

agorabinary2• 12 years ago

I don't mean to sound like a prick, I'm just genuinely curious as to why someone would use windows for some CLI work. Are you using some software that isn't available on more developer-friendly operating systems?

runjake2• 12 years ago

1. Because they prefer Windows.

2. Because their company has standardized on Windows desktops and/or hardware.

3. Because some people might actually believe and have good evidence that Windows is a more "developer friendly" operating system for their needs.

fishtoaster• 12 years ago

1 and 2 are perfectly legit reasons to use Windows. 3, though seems weird. If you're installing something like Babun to make your windows machine act more like a nix machine, it seems reasonable to assume that a nix box would be better for your development needs, and that you have some other reason for using windows (like #1 or #2).

Lifescape• 12 years ago

My situation is I have a Windows machine I game on and don't like rebooting all the time to get into my arch partition. It'd be nice to have a good shell to do some dev work on if I wanted to fix something really quick without rebooting. Right now I just boot up a vm and work on that. Shells I've used in the past (ConEmu, Console 2, Cmder) have all been good, but not good enough.

agorabinary2• 12 years ago

I know from personal experience that Steam works slightly better on windows than linux, so I see your point there.

tokenizerrr• 12 years ago

You should try starting your arch partition in virtualbox, I've had success doing that before (you can still boot into it normally as well).

TTPrograms2• 12 years ago

I use Console 2 with Cygwin in conjunction with an Ubuntu VM on my Windows 8 desktop and it works beautifully - best of all worlds.

userbinator• 12 years ago

Yes, compatibility with existing software is a big part of it. Unless you're exclusively developing for _nix environments you'll have to use Windows at some point.

Also, I think Windows has (or had, depending on preference) a great GUI and a dismal CLI, while _nix is mostly the other way around.

adamors3• 12 years ago

OS X has both actually.

nikatwork2• 12 years ago

Megacorps. FIRE. Standard Operating Environments.

While I am actively infecting my org with FOSS, those of us working in corp land are often forced to use a Windows box behind an NTLM proxy and are blocked from installing vbox.

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

I find it kind of funny how the first thing I wanted to see about this shell was screenshots. That said, it does feature syntax highlighting so that's not entirely ridiculous.

midnitewarrior• 12 years ago

No PowerShell integration makes this useless to me unfortunately.

gcb02• 12 years ago

Everyone who would be satisfied by Cygwin is already using cygwin. so this will not help them.

and people using CMD must use CMD for some reason, and even though that crowd would be please by just being able to maximize their windows, this does not offer any improvement for those people.

sadly, i'm in the second group.

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

Have you looked at Console2?

liveoneggs2• 12 years ago

The first thing to install with cygwin is rxvt, which runs native (not in X)

TTPrograms2• 12 years ago

Also Console2.

kasabali• 12 years ago

I thought rxvt doesn't support Unicode?

_xhok2• 12 years ago

While part of me still wants to tell would-be hackers to just switch to OS X or Linux, I've realized recently that a lot of hackers are bound to Windows because they use various software that only works on Windows, like games, or because of social limitations.

I have no clue how good Babun is, but I have no clue how I ever got anything done on Windows without a Unix shell. Cygwin is not out-of-the-box enough, and the package manager is buggy. If Babun really works, I think it will matter a lot.

doorhammer2• 12 years ago

I'm a self-taught programmer. I've basically been using linux 99% of the time for the past five years, and just have a partition that runs windows if I need it. Funnily enough, the first real programming gig I landed is a full time job doing full stack .NET development, so now it's sort of flipped around. I do miss the command line. I'll have to check this out. I've been looking for a good windows shell replacement.

hetman5• 12 years ago

The other thing worth looking at is the MinGW project. It's pretty easy to get started with the mingw-get package manager (there's an installer you can find here: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started).

Once you have mintty running as your terminal emulator, and a decent shell like bash, life gets a whole lot easier.

The upside is that it's fully native without Cygwin's compatibility layer. The downside is that it won't have as many ported utilities (and probably not as easy to get started with as something like Babun).

Already__Taken3• 12 years ago

You should take a serious look at using powershell, they've aliased a lot of commands to what you expect on linux so you're not completely foreign and it's got a similar workflow mentality you're used to i.e pipe commands.

And you can work with .NET natively.

That said it is NOT to imitate linux, it's conceptually not the same which is good because Windows isn't either.

Here's a 101; commands are `verb-noun -parameter value` these pipe | objects(!) not strings. The first thing you should do is win+R powershell type: get-alias and after that `get-help ls` just drop in powershell wherever you used to calling cmd and see how it goes.

greggman• 12 years ago

I'm on Mac so don't bite my head off.

That said, I was much more productive on Windows for many things. You mentioned games. Game development is much larger on Windows. More access to more engines, tech, examples, tools, etc.

Visual Studio's debugger still blows away anything I've seen on Mac or Linux. PIX, Microsoft's GPU debugger is still the standard to be met.

.NET, C# and Windows Forms were amazing ways to bang out tools for artists and designers that I've seen no match for on other platforms yet.

I guess the short of that is, it really depends on what you're working on.

But I'm still amazed that those things are missing on other platforms. It's not like Visual Studio is some new product. It's been arguably the best debugger for 15+ years? It's surprising that no one as duplicated it on other platforms.

Same with Windows Forms. Sure there are UI libraries but none of them have that perfect storm of features that makes banging out certain kinds of apps so easy. I'm guessing the most used features are Windows Forms Property editor (point it at a class, get instant interface to edit all of the class's properties). Another is probably their data grid editor.

So yea, I love me some unix shell but I'd prefer not to have to choose a good shell vs good other things.

_xhok2• 12 years ago

That is a good point. Visual Studio is actually one of the things I have positive emotions about from my Windows days.

hwh• 12 years ago

Well, I'm on Windows because I don't bother. It's just my workplace machine, running browsers, terminals (so thanks Babun, will try it out now) and a bit of other stuff I don't need Linux for. Yes, my private notebook runs Linux. All my servers do. But our IT departement is Windows centric, and that's about that. While I'm free to configure my desktop machine just the way I want, I prefer to not spend time doing this. I just use the Windows system they gave me, and when it breaks, I call in and they will give me an off-the-shelf new one. Not in a mood to spend my time with fiddling with my desktop machine. The most complex piece of software it runs is the browser.

Morphling2• 12 years ago

I haven't been gaming lately nearly as much as I've used to, but it's still a big part of my computing needs and I just can't get good enough performance in Linux even though PlayOnLinux really has made installing games easier.

I'd love nothing more than run Linux as my main OS, but I hate having to reboot whenever I feel like playing a game.

gosukiwi• 12 years ago

I've been using Cmder(http://bliker.github.io/cmder/) for quite some time when I'm on Windows, normally I just develop on Vagrant or Nitrous using Nitrous Desktop, so when I develop I'm always using an UNIX terminal, Cmder allowed me to do so on Windows, it depends on Console2 and it's quite nice, but oh-my-zsh is actually way more awesome, if this works nicely I'll consider switching. Babun seems to be much more serious than Cmder though, the fact that you can update it using 'babun update' and you can create plugins and such makes it so much potent.

sc00ty• 12 years ago

Just a note: Cmder uses ConEmu, not Console2 :)

ilaksh• 12 years ago

Can this completely replace git-bash? Does it have ssh and ssh-keygen?

pantalaimon• 12 years ago

I wish something as nicely preconfigured as this was available on Linux

chintan39• 12 years ago

Great Work. Brings windows more closer to linux

hiphopyo2• 12 years ago

So apart from the package manager, Babun is basically for people too lazy to install Cygwin, copy over their dotfiles and set a custom font?

reddit_clone• 12 years ago

Would you like to use a linux-like console on a Windows host without a lot of fuzz?

s/fuzz/fuss ?

levosmetalo• 12 years ago

Stopped reading after cygwin was mentioned.

username42• 12 years ago

VirtualBox with a shared directory is also a way to have all the niceties of unix without installing MinGW or Cygwin.

ygra4• 12 years ago

Unless you actually have to work on that shared directory, at which point the abysmal performance results it in being nigh-useless.

yangyang• 12 years ago

You can't invoke binaries on the host that way, though.

nikatwork2• 12 years ago

Unless your asshole infra team configure the SOE to actively bork vbox installs because everything is a "security risk". (But are still running EOL WinXP).

brokenparser• 12 years ago

From the video:

There's also a rich syntax highlighting
invokes vim

Durrrrr

creepr• 12 years ago

I immediately recognized the `pact` tool to be a clone of `apt-cyg`. Did a search on the repo source to confirm (https://github.com/babun/babun/blob/45484c55a3b017248329ddd5...). It seems as if the author of Babun is trying to pass off apt-cyg as his own creation.

meandthebean• 12 years ago

Going down the list of Babun features, it doesn't look like much more than repackaged cygwin. I thought pact was the biggest innovation, but as a clone of an existing project it seems misleading to call this "a new Windows shell."

It isn't without value, as others have said cygwin could be made more usable out-of-the-box, but a little more credit should be given where credit is due.

relaytheurgency• 12 years ago

I also noticed this. I immediately thought ot myself, "How is this any different than my current set up with Cygwin and apt-cyg?"

Surprise: It's not!

maikklein• 12 years ago

I love you. I was thinking how awesome it would be to use tmux on my windows machine so I tried pact install tmux and it worked.

Thank you so much, that's pretty awesome.

a_bonobo• 12 years ago

This looks great, but still has one no-go bug: Spaces in directory names don't work.

https://github.com/babun/babun/issues/74

and it looks like they don't really want to fix it: >We need an install.bat fix to stop the installation in such cases.

The problem is, especially on older Windows machines there are always spaces in directories - XP and 2000 have 'Documents and Settings' in their %USERPROFILE%, so installation will always fail on these (?!?), others will have problems with having a space in their user-name.

This seems to stem from Cygwin.

Babun – A new Windows shell

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