[banku_brougham]

I was just explaining to a colleague the best ways to get acces to shell utilities like awk/sed, as a Windows user. In the balance of ease of setup vs functionality I had recommended the git bash application. This looks even better (for 2016).

[shadowfox]

In addition to all the other stuff, there is also MSYS2 [1] which includes pacman (the package manager from Arch ported over) and a decent sized package repository.

[1] https://msys2.github.io/

[swozey]

I'm a big fan of Babun; http://babun.github.io/

[srean]

If all one wants out of Zsh are the smart tab completions then msys2 is lighter weight alternative. I have found babun a bit laggy.

[netcraft]

on windows also check out this: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow

git bash + gow + conemu makes windows not so bad.

[daxelrod]

If you want a remote unix toolchain in a browser, http://c9.io is a cloud IDE with a browser interface that includes shell access.

It's a full Ubuntu environment running in a Docker container on their servers.

Their free tier is more than enough for playing with the shell.