Hacker News Reader

Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?

Being able to use a real shell with all the tools I'm used to when developing on Windows.

Cygwin in combination with MinGW and the Windows native version of GVim lets me have almost exactly the same environment as I do on Linux and Mac OS X.

You could mount the Windows filesystem from the Linux VM, and use the shell tools that way.

I agree, though, it's still better to have Cygwin, because you can alt-tab and such.

I don't see Cygwin as a file manager but as another (better) interface to Windows. A Linux VM wouldn't let me natively run and debug Windows software, which is the entire point of me being in Windows in the first place.

Using Unix utilities (including Unix paths and forking semantics) on your Windows system. I regularly use Unix utilities to e.g. manage Windows processes; frequently, when a game crashes and leaves me with a blank screen, I can blindly alt-tab to a terminal and 'killall foogame', or if it's worse, ssh in.

I use Cygwin to get approximately the same terminal environment in Windows as I do in Solaris, Linux and Mac. I have a suite of scripts to massage platform differences (e.g. Cygwin getclip / putclip vs xclip vs pbcopy / pbpaste, or cygstart vs open vs gnome-open / xdg-open / etc.). It means that in the terminal environment, I'm equally at home no matter what the OS.

I run Cygwin in rxvt. Using a better terminal than a Windows command window is a must; until I started using rxvt, I didn't even live in bash. Rxvt / bash combo uses considerably less memory, less startup time and less disk space - my dual-boot macbook air has Cygwin installed in the Windows 7 partition.

Half-decent interop between the unix-y bits and the Win32 native bits.

e.g., you might want to have a mostly unix-style build process that uses VC++ as the C compiler, and run it all inside Visual Studio using a makefile project.

Because not everyone want to emulate an entire PC just to run a Unix command?

Or even andLinux [1], which gives you "a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows".

[1]: http://www.andlinux.org/

*32-bit only

I like Windows 7, but I prefer bash for my console. Enter Cygwin + Console 2. Now life is better.

Cygwin gives you (seamless) access to the Windows file system. Is it possible to (say) 'sed ... | wc' a file in the host's directories from a VM?

yes. for example in virtual box you can mount host's directory tree within the vm either in rw/ro mode. from then on, things are seamless.

For certain definitions of seamless. Windows has a habit of messing up nix file permissions and sometimes things just don't work at all unless you do it on the Windows side.

I thought Windows' default filesystem (NFS?) was not safely writeable from Linux. Does your method involve changing Windows' filesystem?

Windows default filesystem is NTFS and it's pretty safe to write. I certainly wouldn't set up something like a server which relies on this, but for personal use or even a development workstation I think it's fine.

I guess it might be a good idea to first check the disk using Windows after something like a power loss while the NTFS partition is mounted. But apparently NTFS-3G (one of the NTFS drivers) can also use the journal to recover the filesystem after a power loss.

I work at a company that currently provides a 32bit version of Windows 7 (the reasons are somewhat unclear.) But the bottom line is that we have the 3gb max addressable memory problem. When I have eclipse, outlook, chrome, various other dev tools and whatnot open, I'm often near the limit, and adding VMWare player or whatnot would probably be too much. So that's one reason... Plus, I find switching back and forth between a vm and the host OS still somewhat slow/clumsy.

(Yes, I know I should get a new job...)

I like the idea of Gow. Anyone know if you can achieve middle mouse button pasting as when you have X11 under cygwin?

Most folks use Putty to avoid the strange switching. Then its like a better command window.

I'm a UNIX and Mac OS X transplant using Windows for embedded hardware development (almost all the tools are Windows-only).

I need a terminal from which I can operate on my Windows file system, but running an entire virtual machine is enormous performance-impacting overkill.

I work with a hosting provider and Cygwin is used all the time to provide SFTP access on Windows boxes. Haven't looked at sshwindows though.

WinSCP works very well for sFTP. http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

Running Unison for easy local mirroring/backup, if nothing else.

Git

That's available on Windows natively.

Really? I wasn't aware... since when?

http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

MSYS is just as native as Cygwin

Not true. MSYS is mainly wrappers around existing, native WIN32/MSVCRT function calls.

Prior to Fall 2007 when I started using Git on windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com