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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

Not fast, ugly, bad integration in the OS, often outdated, bad package manager.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

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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.

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.

... 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?

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

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

PoSH 2+ includes tabs and a method browser IIRC.

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.

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