Hacker News Reader

Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with cygwin? I'm not a big Node guy, but I run it on cygwin for the sake of CoffeeScript and I've written a few small Node apps as well. Hasn't been even slightly painful.

View on HN

Not fast, ugly, bad integration in the OS, often outdated, bad package manager. Well, still better than not having a Unix prompt I guess.

pretty much, compared to an integrated terminal like *nix, im a big fan of things "just working"

I consistently prefer running a Linux terminal in a virtual machine to running Cygwin natively. And it is faster, too.

This is my preferred unix-in-windows setup as well. Free VMWare player and your favorite distro of linux and you're good to go.

The minTTY terminal helps a lot. Windows console is, indeed, a horrid environment.

Agreed about Windows console - I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/.

Try Power Shell.

... which runs in the standard console, and therefore does nothing whatever to address the problem with the Windows console being awful.

It adds a bunch of useful stuff to the Path including select, sort, and ls. The lack of utilities in the standard cmd is my major gripe, what's yours?

The emulator itself is absolutely terrible, compared to, say, gnome-terminal or iTerm.

You were responding to someone's complaint about the lousy console window.

PoSH 2+ includes tabs and a method browser IIRC.

PowerShell is handy, but man, is it slow. If you thought text rendering by cmd.exe was slow, wait till you get a load of PowerShell.

I don't really understand why the console subsystem in Windows is so slow that it can actually add a significant amount of time to a build with lots of scrolling text.

Even the "slow" Terminal.app is a whiz by comparison, to say nothing of Gnome Terminal, or, rxvt.

I remember a few occasions at work where I figured I'd write a quick Powershell script to process some text files or something, and writing the script was quick and pleasant enough, but then it turned out to be quicker to just write a C# program to do the same thing rather than wait for the Powershell script to finish =)

> it turned out to be quicker to just write a C# program

I you really should install cygwin (and MinTTY).

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/shell-tools.htm...

iirc I had cygwin installed as well, but had mostly stopped using it for some reason I forget.

I did a lot of work under cygwin when I had a corporate issued notebook and corporate policies were (at the time) very Windows-friendly (and anything-else-hostile). It made Windows into a bearable experience for a Unix guy.

A plethora of compilers, interpreters, tools, toys...

It's slow, true, but for development, how fast you need it to be?

And there is an advantage (I will regret saying this) in hardware support. You can use a broader selection of hardware with Windows than you can on Linux. Windows can be brain-dead from time to time (it insisted on rotating my notebook screen when I unplugged the rotated LCD) and I never got that Dell to suspend or hibernate to my satisfaction, but, with Cygwin, it's the next best thing after OSX. The first option for developing stuff that won't run on Windows is, of course, a real Unix (the kind that runs X).

broken paths, broken experience - need to constantly nuke npm caches. I finally got it working but it's tacky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com