Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacquesm 4112 days ago
Convince your employer to ship a half decent unix environment with its OS and it will run on windows too. It's mostly a choice by microsoft to ship a half-baked command line interface with its products, you can't blame google for that.
2 comments
NeutronBoy 4112 days ago
By 'half-baked' you mean 'not * nix compatible' command line. Powershell is amazing.
link
tacos 4112 days ago
I'm a Microsoft fanboy and Powershell is bad Python.

How 'bout we meet in the middle and y'all make the changes the Cygwin guys need? And hey, where'd that POSIX subsystem go? Finally got C99 support almost shipped now how 'bout you reverse that other horrible decision, too?

link
davidgerard 4112 days ago
How's it go with Cygwin or mingw?
link
lelandbatey 4112 days ago
I just want to boost big time for Cygwin, it really is amazing how much it improves the experience of using a Windows computer. It gives me the tools I want/need (gcc and python) and the programs I write run without modification in Cygwin, Linux and OS X!

Also, the default terminal emulator that comes with Cygwin, called MinTTY, is fantastic. It doesn't have the flashy features of many native Linux clients, but it has all the basic features one could want (full color support, nice fonts, very durable, no 'gotchas').

The only problem is that support outside of C-based languages is touch-and-go. Mainline Python works flawlessly since it's implemented in C, and all it's tools also work flawlessly (virtualenv, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, django, flask, etc), but other languages like Go or Rust don't really support Cygwin. I'm unaware how well other languages are supported (e.g. Ruby).

So Cygwin will definitely "give you that Unix feeling" on a Windows machine, but it can't always replace a virtual machine.

link
davidgerard 4112 days ago
Whenever I'm stuck on Windows, Cygwin is essential. (I use ssh from the Cygwin terminal.)

It's also great in production - tolerable command-line remote administration, and great for e.g. Nagios plugins that are bash scripts (vastly better than attempting to find a Windows-native plugin that someone else wrote).

link