Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
github.com
github.com
See the discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/apt-cyg-discuss/browse_thread...
I haet haet haet haet haet the f^cking cygwin "Setup.exe".
The cygwin devs are being absolutely butt-retarded for failing to integrate this.
That said, I'm not capable of fixing or adding anything into cygwin, so I never ask them for anything.
Its installer has always been ... lacking.
The example of non-broken installers, in the form of RPM (from Red Hat, with which Cygwin is now associated), or APT (from Debian, even non-broken than RPM) has been around since, oh, 1994 or so (apt really came into its own a few years later, but since 1997/98 it's been a pretty amazing tool).
The development of apt-cyg has already been done.
A key element of managing any project is to be responsive to constructive criticism, and accepting of outside ideas. Especially excellent, long-desired, well-constructed ideas instantiated in code.
I'm taking statements here at face value, but if the response of the Cygwin team has been "thanks, but no, your 'good' isn't our 'perfect'", then they're 1) being butt-retarded and 2) reiterating one of the classic blunders.
Fortunately I don't particularly care, as I've made pretty clear in this thread, my need and use of Cygwin is pretty minimal these days, though on the very rare occasions I find called on to use it, yes, I appreciate it.
Raising devs beyond criticism, BTW, is yet another classic blunder. It's one the GNOME team have been perpetrating for over a decade now -- tech-savvy users aren't it's "target userbase", and non-tech users are, by definition, "unqualified to comment on code". So they've derived by circular logic that those qualified to comment cannot comment relevantly, and those who can comment relevantly aren't qualified to comment.
The project's malaise over the past few years has hardly been a surprise to me.
I'm not saying Cygwin are falling quite so hard into precisely the same trap, but they're clearly making an error here, as are you in dismissing criticism.
I don't worry about it, because I can't play in their sphere. I'm happy to have it, like I'm happy to have gravity, and I can't change or influence either one.
The installer actually has improved incrementally over the years. apt-cyg would be nice, but it's reasonable for them to triage it off the list of things to do, since anyone who cares can install it themselves.
It would be inordinately useful if you could refrain from name calling during any discussion.
The Berkeley Utilities - 40 unix commands ported to DOS http://web.archive.org/web/20090304003628/http://openetwork.... "The Berkeley Utilities follow rigorously the unix System V syntax and include all the options found on any unix system plus a few carefully chosen ones. They used to sell for $200 and are now free." Great documentation, but sadly no source.
Lots of other utils can be also found in GnuWin32 http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html.
Btw, the sed in Gow would deserve update from 3.0.2 ;) https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list
Cygwin is meant to be complete POSIX system, so GOW seems to be rather an alternative to MSYS from MinGW.
Odd--there is on mine, at the bottom of the page, labeled "Search".
Anyway, it's too much trouble to search any time you want to post something, just to avoid setting off the blowhards around here who get annoyed.
Downvotes don't have to indicate "I'm punishing this user", they can simply be "this comment is low-value".
You could easily bypass this, of course, but I don't think most people are trying to hack the front page, they just found something interesting and they're sharing it with us.
That doesn't prevent you from either posting the exact same URL once the original story has been purged from memory (probably after a couple of weeks) or posting a slightly different but completely equivalent URL. For example, IIRC the following are all counted as different URLs:
I imagine https:// would add eight more variants, but I haven't ever heard of anyone trying it in real life.
Currently, Bash (or something very bash-like) is The One True Shell for all Unices, Linux, MacOSX, and even (rootkit ant terminal app) Android. As well as zSeries and numerous other platforms with appropriate compatibility kits.
Microsoft are ghettoizing themselves. It's a large, well-populated ghetto no, but I see a downward trend.
I've been using GNU-Win32 for years; it's generally solid, and the CHM docs are nice, but there are some issues with it. But last time I was looking for a replacement, I couldn't find one! Gow looks like it might be just the ticket.
As for MinGW/MSYS, last I looked, MSYS looked a bit incomplete for my purposes. I don't have any interest in or need for the MinGW gcc and autoconf bits, which tools looked to be its main advantage over GNU-Win32.
GNU-Win32 is solid, integrates natively, and is good enough for deployment purpose.
That said, the heroic efforts to turn Windows into Unix, when on the rare occasion I find myself stuck in a Windows instance, are very highly appreciated.
At one point in my life, I was taking advantage of this to run X on my Linux box (cleaner and a few additional features that Windows didn't offer), with tunneled SSH to Windows to run, among other things, some Windows-based applications (which retained enough commandline features to be usable in this fashion) in an environment which almost fully resembled Unix.
It helped markedly for both productivity and sanity.
Adding the "Command line here" context menu item is nice, too (although that's available by Ctrl+right-click in at least Windows 7 anyway).
Yet I still run cygwin at work. Partly I think it's because we still use XP, and I don't get to throw as much memory and video at VirtualBox as I'd like.
This extends to SSH apps, too. Putty? Seriously? And implementations of tabbed and paned shells (the few you can choose from on Windows) are terribly ugly and clunky.
Windows 7 (and presumably 8) is a fine OS. I really had no beef with it. But as an engineer I spend far too much time at a command prompt to ever consider going back.
Also -- you don't boot your VM every time you want to use it. You keep it running in the background. Allocate 256MB of memory to it and forget it until you need to use a real shell.
No tabs and No panes so you're limited to using the OS window manager, and if you want to achieve multiple usable sessions at once you're going to have to arrange and resize these windows yourself or you'll have to use another 3rd party app.
No integrated private key authentication. You have to use like 3 GUI screens (wha?!?!?) to set this up and then you have to run a 3rd party app like pageant.
I had many other gripes before I switched (to a mac in my case) but I can't remember them anymore.
I hate not having tabs too. About running Pageant, isn't that the Unix way? "Do one thing and do it well"? :)
There is still some grasps with the shipped versions of the tools i.e. missing some parameters and not having `awk` is a bummer.
I've always found the DOS terminal to be very dissatisfying. I recall when I first encountered WinNT40WS, which a colleague had billed as "a multiuser OS with a full shell", that, other than the lack of a full shell and useful utilities (I rapidly discovered MKS, UWIN, and Cygwin, followed very shortly thereafter with Linux, which supplanted the original OS a few months later), was the absolute crap terminal support.
That this is still the case (from my relatively minimal experiences/exposure to Win7) can just be piled on top of the large heap of embarrassments Microsoft have produced).
When installing Cygwin, among the first things I do is create a shortcut using the rxvt (non-X) client, with a command to launch a log-in shell session, with appropriate font and color settings. You can even run Windows commands and shells within this, though of course, they will also break in some full-screen instances.
Mostly I just avoid the whole problem. Pretty successfully for months at a stretch these days.
I thought that was the main draw of Cygwin.
MinGW comes with an installer that gives you GCC. Make sure you install MSYS as well (comes with bash, etc). Add the bin directories to your %PATH% when you're done. Then set Console to use bash as your default shell, and you have a pretty close setup to the command-line experience of Linux/Mac.
Hmm... but.... why would I wan't to do that? If it opened a window running bash that'd be interesting, but I never ever want to run cmd.exe if I can possibly avoid it. Perhaps that's just me though... can anyone comment on how this compares to cygwin, generally? I see that it's smaller but I don't find cygwin's footprint especially troubling.
On Windows, I deploy native 64-bit Python, and the application has quite a few command line pyramid scripts, which works perfectly fine with grep, cut, sed, sort, etc from gnuwin32. Don't see the need for cygwin.
I have added the feature to numerous Vista and XP machines, it is easy enough to add manually though there are many utils that will do it for you, but I can't say I've never seen it present by default.
I would want to do that to run a batch file, see the output.
I have, for example, an integration server, Server 2003. It keeps batch files for XML to JDE eleventy directories deep. It is sometimes helpful to exec these manually to see what the trouble is.
Cygwin has a package for that called chere. The whole point of this other thing is that it tuns in cmd.exe, so complaining that it opens cmd.exe is really complaining about the main thing, not just this one feature...
So, instead, I've been using MinGW's msys project. I don't think it is quite as small, but it does offer a package manager.
One small thing in msys that I particularly like is that I can do thins like: cd //server/share/some/directory I never saw powershell or cygwin do that. On Solaris I can configure automount to do that which is good enough, but just working is also nice.
However, I don't see that Gow has been updated since the last time it was featured on HN.
See Article ID: 137890 here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890
if it doesn't, then it's rather alternative to MinGW, not Cygwin
2. This doesn't look much like Cygwin. At best it's like MSYS with MinGW compiled tools. Either way, no package management, no auto updates.