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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Things hold me back from "loving" windows (I say this as a continuing daily user of Windows for 18+ years) as my primary system instead of my MacBook Air.

  o Add a half decent gcc/bash/posix tool chain (something built in, not cygwin)
  o Include a decent terminal/ssh client.
  o License apple's touch pad

They've got a lot of things going for them:

  o Better Games 
  o The new tablet/wacom SurfacePro blows away anything apple 
    offers for stylus digitization on the iPad.

Microsoft has a chance here - they just have to keep pushing.

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Agree on your 2nd & 3rd bullets, but I would have so very little faith in the 1st happening with any good success

What drove me to mac was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with cygwin

What drove me to linux (both ubuntu and debian) was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with ports/brew

I'm back on windows now (because the linux desktop is just lagging behind in areas) only I'm using a VM to run linux shell. Now I get all the nice gui but can still run shell with no hiccups. (I could have gone back to mac and done VM too, but I just prefer windows)

Indeed - I always have at least one Linux VM running on my Windows Workstation. I found, that when I really want the nice posix tool chain, that was a more satisfactory approach than futzing with cygwin all the time. Perhaps that should be my long term windows solution - thanks.

> Include a decent terminal/ssh client.

It's a commercial product, but I've used SecureCRT for many years, and it is very nice. It would be great if a decent ssh client were included with Windows, but I don't mind paying for software like this - it pays for itself many times over.

http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html

PuTTY is free.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Neither Putty, nor Secure CRT - both of which I have used extensively (I even purchased Secure CRT for personal use on my windows system) are as polished as to Terminal.App on OS X. It's not like Terminal.App is 10x better than SecureCRT (It isn't) - and I love the fact that I can get Putty up and running on every windows system I touch in < 30 seconds - but if you spend as much time in the console as I do, even a 10-15% improvement is enough to chose a different platform for the terminal app alone, and I would suggest, after having used all three of these tools, for a minimum of 1000 hours each (approx. 1000+ hours on Putty, 2000+ hours for SecureCRT, 4000+ hours on Terminal.app) - that the OS X Terminal.app gives me that 10% improvement.

I don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit that the Terminal application is the single most important driver as to which operating system I use, but I guess it's okay as long as I realize it's not everyone's.

I find this comment very interesting, because the first thing I did when moving to a mac was ditch terminal.app for iTerm2. Coming from putty, terminal.app was terrible to try and use.

Arcane commands to move between tabs/windows, command keys going to the window and not the terminal (such as pageup, pagedown, home, end), limited configurability and a middle button paste in an ecosystem without middle buttons... all kept me from seeing terminal.app as more than just something to be immediately replaced.

Your experience is obviously different than mine, but I ditched terminal.app as soon as I learned about iTerm2.

I've certainly experimented with iTerm2, but, except for radically better copy+paste performance of large blocks of text, nothing about it really pulled me in. Perhaps I should spend more time with it.

To your points - Tabs are cmd+shift { }, which feel very natural on my keyboard given the location of cmd+shift - you 'chord" thumb+little finger and then switch windows with your right hand (or maybe it's just entered my finger DNA).

Windows Switching is the OS X standard Cmd+`

PageUp/Page down are just your standard Fn+Up/Down - but, I'll admit I just normally use the touch pad it's so fast, particularly with two+finger drag + acceleration.

The loss of the middle put-on would probably be painful - but I've never had one, so no huge impact to me personally. (Copy/Paste are, once again, touch pad reflexes that I do constantly).

But - with all that said - I really should spend more time with iTerm2 - lots of people rave about it. Time to give it another try.

Interested to hear more about what you like with the mac terminal.

Things I like about putty include that you can launch a profile very quickly (start->run, putty @profile_name); it's easy to carry a configuration around (copy a bit of the registry); fonts are fine; easy colour configuration for profiles; quick-switching to full-screen; you can alt-tab between terminals. OSX has workspaces which is an advantage, but lacks some of the others.

But I get the feeling you're talking about the terminal itself - what's the edge for the OSX approach?

And - wear your terminal with pride! 7-day roguelike is next week if you've ever wanted to have a go.

It's been a while since I played with Putty - and i"m not near a windows system to do the quick compare contrast - but the rapid resizability of windows and the re-wrapping of text seemed to have been an issue in my memory. I seem to recall that they always inherited the god-awful windowsOS context for windows, so I couldn't just resize windows - had to go through the WindowOS environment.

Terminal.App has a wonderful and instant resizing capability. And it's integration with the MacBook Pro/Air's touch pad is, really, second to none.

I think you're confusing Putty with cmd.exe

You are right regarding resizability - putty resizes naturally, it's cmd.exe which doesn't allow full screen resizing with a mouse (at least on windows xp).

But, the wrap issue is annoying - you can't do a ps -auxwww , see that the line length is too long, and the resize the window and have your text rewrap. (At least on putty 0.6, the version on my vm instance)

I don't know if they've added tabs to putty (a quick search through http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.62/puttydoc.txt indicates they haven't) - and that's also a feature I use a lot of.

Don't get me wrong - I love putty, and it's one of the first two or three things I put on every windows system. I love that you can use it as a serial console as well - great for consoling into cisco routers - particularly now that Microsoft in it's infinite wisdom has dropped hyper terminal. In fact, Putty is better than terminal.app in that regard - Terminal.app doesn't do console ports!

But, if I am spending many thousands of hours at the console, Terminal.app (or, possibly iTerm) is going to make me happier and more productive than putty. Probably not 2x more productive, or even 50% more productive - but certainly 10%, which is enough for me.

> But, the wrap issue is annoying - you can't do a ps -auxwww , see that the line length is too long, and the resize the window and have your text rewrap. (At least on putty 0.6, the version on my vm instance)

You're right that putty doesn't do this, but I always run screen inside putty, which will rewrap text when the window resizes.

For me, having to switch between backslashes and forward slashes for file system directories in the terminal is annoying enough to make me want to use any UNIX based system instead of Windows.

On my personal machine, I basically only use Firefox, Sublime Text 2, and Terminal anymore.

> On my personal machine, I basically only use Firefox, Sublime Text 2, and Terminal anymore.

My ideal dev environment is Windows running putty connecting to a local linux VM or a bunch of VMs running on a nearby ESXi server and then Firefox (and occasionally Chrome and IE for compatability testing) and a bunch of other general stuff (Thunderbird for email, Skype, music player, etc).

On a dual screen machine I'll have the putty window (or windows) made fully screen on one monitor and the remaining stuff on the other monitor. Inside the ssh session I run screen to give me multiple shells without lots of windows or tabs. A lot of my navigation is done via the keyboard.

The desktop machine is also for family and guest usage so the ability to switch user accounts but leave existing stuff running is a must.

This setup means I can also login from pretty much anywhere (that I can get an ssh connection from) and resume where I left off, including having tunnelled HTTP connections to my dev network via ssh.

For Windows the only terminal which matters is ConEmu. SSH clients like Putty are good enough.

Concerning gcc: Visual Studio 2012 Express can be downloaded for free on the Microsoft website (OK, you have to pay if you want to use the Professional edition; but since version 2012 the Express version is far less limited than the older versions). Linux/OS X lovers will hate me, but I prefer Visual Studio over the gcc toolchain (I personally miss something similar on Linux).

Concerning bash: Windows also offers PowerShell (depending on version of Windows either included or can be downloaded for free on the Microsoft website). Many convinced command-line users admit that PowerShell is better thought-out than bash or other Unix shells. Microsoft says for most things on Windows it is better to use the GUI, but if you really need or prefer a command-line shell, we offer PowerShell for free.

I'm almost 100% certain that anything properly designed these days will be better thought out than bash - but, 20+ years of bash knowledge in my fingertips is hard to say goodbye to.

If I was starting out now on windows - I'd spend the next 2 to 3 years training my fingers on powershell (there is a difference between book knowledge, and instinctive "finger" knowledge), and I'm sure it would serve me well. But now, I just want to leverage my existing knowledge.

And yes, I realize that makes me a relic.

With regards to "it is better to use the GUI" - scripting configuration of dozens (hundreds?) of remote servers through the GUI is probably possible, but not something I would look forward to. Once again, old habits die hard, and having 30-40 ssh sessions open to various environments is like a good fitting shoe - it's just comfortable.

Microsoft is full of talented developers, why have they not added all those things that make people switch to a UNIX system yet?

The number of people who might switch from OS X to a mooted Windows with a POSIXy toolchain is approximately zero. Engineering time and energy are not free.

I disagree. This is one of the main reasons that drove me to switch over to OSX. I don't think I'm alone in this either. I have a number of colleagues that have switched from windows as their primary OS for similar reasons.

I'd like to believe that if Microsoft were to add POSIX support, and a decent terminal as part of the default Windows installation it would go along way to improving their perception in the minds of technical users.

Microsoft is an organization made up of many of the smartest, most creative developers on Earth that has been completely hobbled by organizational bureaucracy and office politics. Microsoft stifles more good ideas in one year than most companies have in a decade.

The world must benefit from all the developers who get frustrated and say "screw you guys, I'll do it myself with blackjack and hookers", and quit to start their own company. Right?

Would you want Ballmer flipping your desk out the window because you dared to dilute the purity of the Windows ecosystem with UNIX?

Thus, PowerShell instead of something like bash.

They have long since been shipping Interix:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

I've seen Microsoft Xenix, but I've never even heard of Internix. Do they even advertise this?

In what sense do you mean advertise?

There is enough info out there that the Wikipedians wrote a bunch of articles that have not been deleted yet...

I've never, ever heard of it prior to you mentioning it. Not even once. Not even from people that really like Windows and UNIX alike.

Last time I looked the vast majority of Windows users don't need the console (or even a terminal emulator) and don't tend to compile software themselves or use large parts of the usual UNIX tools. So there are very few users who migrate away from Windows due to that and thus very little incentive to invest a significant amount of effort and money in that.

Then there is the point that Windows is very different from UNIX (even though you can support POSIX as an API layer alongside Win32). As Jeffrey Snover (one of the architects of PowerShell) once put it: They thought about that but noticed that UNIX tools won't help any Windows sysadmin as they are good tools to work with a UNIX system that's mostly based around text files scattered throughout the file system. But they don't work so well in managing Windows which is more centered around the registry and other mechanisms.

> Last time I looked the vast majority of Windows users don't need the console.

And a vast majority of Firefox users don't use the developer tools. They're still doing something about it.

Also, what about microsoft's programers. Are they using Linux when they don't have the tools they need?

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