Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

by pmoriarty • 12 years ago

175 112 12 years ago

baq• 12 years ago

i already have msysgit and mingw. should i use gow?

rossy2• 12 years ago

Probably not. From the looks of it, GoW is just a mashup of MSYS and MinGW compiled binaries, much like msysGit except without Git.

natch• 12 years ago

"Gow is one of the few things that makes Windows bearable/usable"

Good quote, but that is not necessarily a positive if you look at things from the perspective of the sooner Windows is ditched, the better.

blumkvist• 12 years ago

2015 will be the year!

cbd1984• 12 years ago

2015 will be the year!

For Windows Phones? Don't hold your breath.

quotemstr9• 12 years ago

Why? Windows is an excellent system and gets a lot of things right that POSIX gets wrong. WMI is wonderful; COM is wonderful; the NT kernel is from 1989 and still worlds ahead of Unixy kernels in many respects. (It's 2014 and I still can't open a file descriptor that represents a process.)

orf• 12 years ago

I think some of your examples are iffy, COM and WMI are sometimes wonderful but sometimes definitely not. Windows is not perfect and POSIX is better for some use-cases, vice versa.

Sir_Cmpwn• 12 years ago

This doesn't really seem like an alternative to Cygwin. Cygwin is valuable because it provies a POSIX environment. I write my programs for sane systems and then Cygwin allows me to get them running on Windows fairly easily.

justincormack• 12 years ago

The repo does not seem to have the source code, which is a bit of a problem as most of the software is GPL.

jackalope• 12 years ago

When I used to install Cygwin, it was to get (in order of importance): ssh, vim, rsync & X11. Gow doesn't include the last two, so it feels like an apples/oranges comparison (for my use case). Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age, so a simple, lightweight set of tools like this definitely has its place.

I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did, I would probably just spin up a VM with a tiny live Linux ISO, because it would bring in so much other goodness without any extra effort.

mikelward• 12 years ago

It only kind of has ssh. It has the PuTTY SSH client, but no SSH server.

vertex-four2• 12 years ago

Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age

It includes the majority of stuff you'd want as part of Powershell, just under different names, and not available as separate executables on the filesystem. If Powershell is lacking something, you can access any .Net class on the system. Once OneGet is released with the next version of Windows and people start packaging stuff for it, you'll be able to grab additional utilities for pretty much anything.

Windows isn't that far behind. It's mostly just not UNIX. Most things are there, just done in very different ways.

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

"Most things are there, just done in very different ways."

Does it have something like the POSIX fork() system call? Apparently, its lack in Windows is the main thing that makes Cygwin as slow as it is.[1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2512892/how-to-speed-up-c...

oblio3• 12 years ago

Equivalents for:

wget or curl

lftp

dig

telnet

And I mean similar features, not Invoke-WebRequest, ftp, nslookup or writing my own clone in 2000 lines of Powershell.

And to this day I have no idea why telnet was removed from the base installation.

The Windows command line is getting better with Powershell, but even Powershell can't beat 1000 man years of tool development. And I really hope that package manager takes off cause right now most Windows non-Microsoft tools are either shady or crappy.

cplease2• 12 years ago

Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age, so a simple, lightweight set of tools like this definitely has its place.

Others have already mentioned Powershell. Not by default, but Microsoft has offered Windows Services for UNIX for some time. Free download too: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274

Truthfully, I've never used it myself, because Cygwin exists and it actually provides full POSIX on Windows, unlike GOW et al.

hughw• 12 years ago

Supported OSes: "Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP"

They haven't updated WSfU for years now.

johnloeber• 12 years ago

Honestly, I don't really understand why people use UNIX-shells like Cygwin in Windows. I found them slow and difficult to work with, to the extent that it's much easier to just spin up a VM with a lightweight Linux distribution (or to dual boot, but that's another use case).

jamespo• 12 years ago

Probably because they want something to work with their windows tools

gfodor• 12 years ago

Yeah exactly, some of us are forced to develop software on windows (game development for example) so cygwin is a nice way to reduce some of the pain.

roxtar3• 12 years ago

I develop on Windows for Windows and use these tools. Here is my reasoning.

It's easy to see that Unix shell tools are much superior to the Windows cmd. There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I have found PowerShell to be slow. It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.

Given that, I would rather install Cygwin or MinGW. Spinning up a VM is much more heavy-weight that just directly using Cygwin.

quotemstr9• 12 years ago

Plus you can run nmake and cl.exe directly from Cygwin bash and everything works just fine.

UnoriginalGuy4• 12 years ago

There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I have found PowerShell to be slow.

Powershell can be a little slow to launch. Actual execution speed is pretty respectable. It does get faster after the first couple of times as it will ngen stuff into the GAC (this is particularly bad on new Windows installs where little .Net code has previously ran in any contexts).

It can be fixed by running a script like this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2008/09/02/speedi...

Which will populate the GAC.

It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.

You're missing out. Powershell's syntax is quite intuitive after you learn the basics, you quickly start to be able to guess commands and params.

diltonm2• 12 years ago

When you run ps on Cygwin on Windows you are seeing the actual Windows processes, everything you do in the shell is on the Windows machine. Without Cygwin; Windows IMHO is nowhere near as friendly, at the CLI. I can completely get along fine on Windows without Cygwin (when I have to run Windows) but it makes the experience tolerable to have it. It makes Windows like Linux at the CLI.

Elrac3• 12 years ago

I use a set of Unix utils similar to the one mentioned in the post, just to do spiffy things in a CMD shell once in a while.

Other people have already mentioned that this is a much more lightweight kind of process than firing up a whole operating system in a VM. But more significantly, these utils are a bunch of .EXEs I can toss into a directory, possibly adding it to my PATH. Working (sometimes) on a "work" PC with no admin privileges, I think I can't install something like VMWare. I'd also worry about ending up with a big chunk of my memory chewed up as long as VMWare is running.

jqm• 12 years ago

I took a job recently in a Windows ecosystem. I hadn't used Windows on a day to day basis in 4 or 5 years and my co-workers laughed behind my back as I stumbled around clumsily clicking buttons looking for the control panel.

The laughter turned to open mouthed jealous amazement when I installed Cygwin and started doing everything they were at 5X speed including remotely on the servers. (Yes, firing up remote desktop and clicking file icons is slow..... go figure!)

To be frank, Cygwin is the only reason I didn't walk out the door the first week. It's generally fantastic and has been a lifesaver. I get lots of guarded curious inquiries.

Windows is getting better, but as of right now, its still pretty clumsy comparatively. Powershell looks interesting but I don't want to take the time learn all the intricacies. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it would be years before I could get around as fast as I do with Cygwin. And that assumes equivelent functionality... which I doubt at this point. Some of my Vim settings (colors etc) didn't show up correctly in Powershell for instance.

So... that's why some people would use Unix shells in Windows.

bsenftner• 12 years ago

Looking at the change_log, it does not look like their version of BASH has been updated recently, indicating it is capable of the ShellShock exploit.

Elrac3• 12 years ago

This seems hugely irrelevant to me. Would you consider using Unix lookalike utilities under Windows to launch an Internet-facing Web server that allows users to do CGI scripts? Because that's pretty much the only scenario where ShellShock would be an issue.

quotemstr9• 12 years ago

Cygwin is a fantastic system put together by people crazy and talented enough to dig deeply into both the POSIX world and the NT world. I can't recommend it highly enough. A bag of ported utilities is absolutely no substitute for something that, in effect, amounts to GNU/NT.

Yes, there are some warts, but they're papered over remarkably well. Give mintty a shot: you'll never go back to conhost.

diltonm2• 12 years ago

I completely agree, Cygwin has real OpenSSH, well you can even run Gnome on Windows if you want; even as your main shell or I was doing that back in 2002 not sure it would work these days. Overall Cygwin can't be beat. If Gow has enough utility for folks who want to use it; that's cool but for me when I'm stuck using Windows for anything, Cygwin rocks.

a3n5• 12 years ago

I run cygwin X so that I can have the tabbed version of urxvt.

gregschlom• 12 years ago

Give mintty a shot: you'll never go back to conhost.

No, give cmder a shot: http://bliker.github.io/cmder/ I've tried mintty and cmder, and cmder was just perfect for me.

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

How does cmder compare to ConEmu?

https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

ElliotH• 12 years ago

Oh my goodness thank-you! I'm forced to use Windows at work, and this is the first terminal emulator that looks not terrible!

Jare• 12 years ago

I use Mintty because Cygwin's tmux didn't work with ConEmu or Cmder, but Mintty was ok.

FWIW, I took a quick stab at the tmux & ncurses code to try to find a fix, but it was far from obvious. Maximus (ConEmu author) said it had to do with how cygwin flags stdin streams, which just happens to break when ConEmu provides them. (sorry details vague)

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

A very convenient improvement that makes a difference is http://mridgers.github.io/clink/ (readline mostly). Tiny, useful, fresh air.

girvo2• 12 years ago

Oh, wow. I don't run windows anymore, but that's quite an amazing little tool. My work mates who use windows are going to be stoked with this, thanks. Currently they're all use cmder, but some struggle with the impedance mismatch of a GNU/NT system like that. This with native binaries will be an amazing setup!

bkeroack• 12 years ago

The issue with Cygwin is that disk IO in particular is incredibly slow. Which makes things like git substantially slower than on Linux or OSX.

rossy2• 12 years ago

The problem isn't with disk IO as much as it's with speed of the stat() syscall. IIRC Cygwin stat() is backed by three different NT syscalls, so it's slow because it requires three transitions to kernel mode, where Linux only needs one. Setting core.fileMode to false makes Git use a Windows optimized version of stat(), so it runs a lot faster.

Unfortunately it's still not quite as fast as on Linux and OS X, but it's about as fast as native/MSYS versions of Git on Windows.

yuhong• 12 years ago

On Cygwin, I wonder if a SetCurrentDirectoryEx function would be a good idea: https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-04/msg00632.html

Moto7451• 12 years ago

I disagree. Having gnu utils available from CMD is a God send. Sometimes a batch script is the right tool but you need the capabilities of something from gnu utils. It's much simpler to just invoke the tool than to rewrite the script as a windows flavored bash script you run from Cygwin.

Additionally you'll find a lot of scripting language libraries just wrap gnu utils and invoke commands using a sub shell. Being able to run those scripts/libraries from batch files or other windows processes without dealing with Cygwin is awesome too.

deng4• 12 years ago

Indeed. Cygwin is fantastic, but one must always remember: once you go there, you can never go back. If you mix native Windows binaries with ones from Cygwin, all kinds of weird things can happen. I mostly work with native Windows binaries from ezwinports nowadays, together with ConEmu, Eclipse and a native Emacs; I can use normal Windows paths and things Just Work. Granted, it's more cumbersome to set this up than just installing Cygwin, but people are working on that (see for instance: MSYS2 at http://msys2.github.io/)

deng4• 12 years ago

From the looks of it this is definitely not an alternative to Cygwin, because the latter implements a complete POSIX layer. Instead, this seems to be a collection of native and MSYS binaries, which is fine and all, but I kinda doubt that they have the quality of ezwinports, which is still the best address for native Windows binaries of free software. Also, they don't provide the source and the build scripts for their binaries.

GilbertErik• 12 years ago

Yeah yeah. I opened this: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/issues/164

Please comment with clarifications.

xfGnB6P• 12 years ago

I gave Gow a shot when I got a new Windows PC at work a while back. In my experience it is completely broken for anything but the most trivial use cases.

Basic things didn't work, like "ls -t|head" (broken/missing SIGPIPE implementation IIRC), and "(g)find -iname '*.txt'" (I could not for the life of me stop it from expanding the glob).

I gave up after a couple days and went back to cygwin.

mlvljr• 12 years ago

Was my experience with Cygwion itself 9 years ago or so -- broken beyond usable for anything except look-ma tests :)

lnanek2• 12 years ago

This doesn't seem to have some of the things I use in Cygwin, so it useless to me. Also 10MB vs. 100MB is irrelevant to me. I don't download any movies and music or anything like that so my tiny flash hard drives still have plenty of room to make that difference irrelevant. Might be good for some people.

jedisct1• 12 years ago

What's the point over MSYS2?

UnoriginalGuy4• 12 years ago

Shell window from any directory: Adds a Windows Explorer shell window (screenshot) so that you can right-click on any directory and open a command (cmd.exe) window from that directory.

Windows already has that, hold down shift and right click either on a subfolder or in the white space/nothing within an open folder.

Since, I dunno, XP maybe? I don't think 2000 had it. I know Vista did.

fencepost• 12 years ago

That was almost certainly the "Command Prompt Here" powertoy for XP, but it was then integrated into Vista and 7.

vram222• 12 years ago

Yes, it was probably that. Some of those powertoys were cool. I remember installing and using that one. Didn't know that it was integrated into Windows 7 with that Shift+Right-Click shortcut though, thanks.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Well, that's kind of undiscoverable; it really ought to be on the shell extension context menu.

UnoriginalGuy4• 12 years ago

Much like Mac, Windows is designed for consumers primarily, power users/programmers/etc secondarily.

It can be reconfigured to appear without shift:

http://superuser.com/questions/240279/windows-open-command-p...

Although the Windows 8.1 right click bottom left for the new Power Users Menu was a welcomed addition that consumers could inadvertently run across.

gentlebend• 12 years ago

While we're on the topic, here's a cute tip: To make the opposite move -- from the command prompt to an explorer window of the current directory -- use "start ."

Too• 12 years ago

Easier to remember: explorer .

girvo2• 12 years ago

Similar, for OS X use "open ." (or replace the "." with whatever file you want to open)

arthurfm• 12 years ago

XP didn't have this feature. It was in Vista onwards.

tonyplee• 12 years ago

Has any tried busybox for Windows?

How is that compare to Gow?

jhallenworld• 12 years ago

They should provide tools that run in both Windows and plain MS-DOS / FreeDOS (hey, sometimes it's useful). One way I know how to do this is to compile with http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ and link in the CWSDPMI DOS extender from http://homer.rice.edu/~sandmann/cwsdpmi/index.html

The DOS extender will not run if it detects DPMI provided by Windows, so the binaries work in both environments.

I suggest this for some Atari 800 utilities I wrote: https://github.com/jhallen/atari-tools

lolive• 12 years ago

I dunno about Gow. But I have been very happy with the (not so) small package included in MobaXterm: ssh, X11, busybox, git, perl, ... http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

callesgg• 12 years ago

Unfortianly Gow is very buggy.

And the maintaner does not reveal sources for the binaries, which makes it hard to help out. In practise he is acctualy breaking the GPL license, by not giving sources.

vram222• 12 years ago

I had used UWIN for a while a few years ago, when I was on Windows and needed UNIX functionality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UWIN

It was originally written by David Korn, creator of the Korn shell. Can't forget "ksh -o vi", which let you edit your command history with vi commands. (It is like "set -o vi" on bash these days.) I used to use it as the last line in my .kshrc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korn_(computer_scientist)

Not sure where UWIN stands in comparison to Gow and Cygwin but it was somewhat useful. IIRC, it was at least more than a collection of UNIX utilities.

The installation procedure (from an AT&T site) was a bit of a pain but doable.

geofft• 12 years ago

I like how we live in a world where you can say "open source" and put a bunch of compiled binaries in a bin directory. Leaving aside the trail of GPL violations, it's ... certainly something ... that the phrase "open source" doesn't make people think about whether source should be _present_, open or otherwise.

The "contributing" page is pretty awesome, along the same lines: it describes a list of things you need to do in order to ask the maintainer to implement the feature you want.

kolev• 12 years ago

I've been using Babun [1] and fully enjoying it.

[1] https://babun.github.io/

Demiurge2• 12 years ago

I still use Windows SUA for my unix needs on Windows. It allows me to do most things and provides real POSIX (except fork), but stuff like sensitive filenames and unix style permissions actually work with NTFS. OpenSSH runs as a real service, and so on. I don't understand why this subsystem never got much recognition and suacommunity.com is even dead now...

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

Originally Windows had the concept of personalities and three were available Win32, OS/2 and POSIX.

OS/2 went away, as soon as, OS/2 stopped being relevant.

POSIX was there mostly to get the foot into the door of US government, due to its requirements in POSIX compatibility.

I guess when this stopped being required and Win32 was accepted as viable platform, there wasn't a business case to keep on spending resources in POSIX support.

After all, Windows is not alone in lack of full POSIX support when one looks to embedded and mainframe OS as well.

Demiurge2• 12 years ago

It's deprecated now, but it is still there in Windows 8, and can be used for a lot of things not even possible in 'build to win32' scheme.

bdunbar• 12 years ago

I've read about Windows SUA (and it's predecessors) but have never been sure what problem it solves for me.

Got a use case or two?

nstart• 12 years ago

I use cygwin on a daily basis and the only question I have is, apart from a smaller disk space footprint, which is becoming increasingly relevant, how much more lightweight does one need cygwin to be? This obviously does not apply to the true power users of cygwin. I was thinking more along the lines of a general user of it. Basic greps, batch file operations, etc.

devniel• 12 years ago

I have been using Gow almost three years, it's a great tool !

Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

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