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Awesome Windows

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31 pointsiKenshu16 comments

This isn't a curated list, this is just a list of most popular apps in every category.

I'm surprised about the zsh mention. It seems to run under Cygwin mostly, right? I guess under MSYS2, as well. But there is nothing that mentions this specialty.

On Windows 10 / Bash you can just apt-get install zsh

https://www.howtogeek.com/258518/how-to-use-zsh-or-another-s...

Vim but not Emacs?

Yikes.

This is a flamewar waiting to happen...

Time for a GNU/Linux version

https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/awesome-linux

You can look up all the awesome lists here: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

Sure. That's at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/

If you're unfamiliar, this isn't particular to any distro necessarily, although yes it is largely. It's just a fantastic resource for documentation on all kinds of packages and system configuration.

FWIW, to others reading this thread, if you run Linux the Arch Linux Wiki is an amazing resource you should check out, regardless of what distribution you run.

Some of the info there is, of course, Arch-specific, but most of it can be applied to any other Linux distribution.

Cygwin is not mentioned on there. I'd rate that critical to make Windows even moderately bearable. The main problem, of course, is that Cygwin is way too slow, but I'd rather suffer that live without it.

What are your main uses for Cygwin as opposed to just using WSL / Bash on Windows?

Any 32-bit edition of Windows, or being stuck on a pre-Win 10 version (corporate desktop, for example).

Personally I prefer to wrap Cygwin in http://www.msys2.org/ these days, which gives me pacman as a package manager.

> Any 32-bit edition of Windows

I was quite disappointed when I bought a cheap Windows Table/Laptop to tinker with. And the Windows installer would not let install the 64bit version on 2 gigs of ram...

> Personally I prefer to wrap Cygwin in http://www.msys2.org/

Can you tell me more about that? Isn't cygwin and msys2 two separate project?

"At its core is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer)".

So I guess "wrap cygwin" isn't quite accurate, but it's based on the cygwin and extended.

Cygwin's not just bash (in fact, you don't even have to use bash in Cygwin -- you can use zsh, for instance). There are thousands of packages in Cygwin's package manager, and you can also compile your own using gcc or another compiler you can get through Cygwin.

"Bash on Windows" is pretty misleading - it's really a Linux kernel translator. You can use (supported) three distros, and as long as your Linux software doesn't use any non-translated APIs, it will Just Work.

This is why the default Ubuntu will let you apt-get more-or-less anything from the Ubuntu binary repos.

WSL / Bash on windows comes with apt-get and the entire Ubuntu repository.

As a former Cygwin user, I consider WSL vastly superior for my uses and have switched for good earlier this month.

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