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Comment by cyborb | Hacker News Reader

That's what drives me craziest about programming in windows, the freak'n console is awful

That's what I never got about Windows and especially Windows devs. How can you get anything done with all that clicking and no unix tools?

You know it is possible to use windows without a mouse? I make a living cutting .net code in Visual Studio sans toolbars/designer windows, we're not all as inept as this thread makes us out to be. Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but many unix tools have been ported to windows.

Well the whole point is that it is a pain to use them. There needs to be no difference between actual developers trying to use the system, but I stick to GUIs on windows (I run Win at home, Mac at work and deploy to GUI-less Ubuntu) because the other tools simply suck on that platform.

The available console or ssh apps are horrible compared to the same apps or linux or mac; and the unix tools have sort-of-been-ported, and I can use them through, say, cygwin but they're not 'nicely working' as they should be. I mean, it's simpler to just ssh to an ubuntu instance than get&use the same tools directly on your machine.

That wasn't GPs point though, "all that clicking and no unix tools" seems like FUD.

I dunno, I must have a different usage pattern to a lot of people here, but I've used tools such as git/ruby/node/telnet/etc across Windows(conEmu + bash)/Linux/OSX and don't really have a strong preference for any OS in this regard. I get that there are differences, and maybe I'm just lucky and haven't seemed to hit these issues that make Windows so horrible for a lot of devs.

IDEs and Stockholm syndrome.

IDE's rock. Eclipse anyway, it runs wherever I need it, runs finr with ssh -X. Eclipse gives me the same solid user experience on Windows and any Linux I've ever tried it on. I can't remember arcane keystroke combinations and the refactoring in Eclipse can't be beat. How about Navigating to the Implementation for a method? Eclipse makes this easy. This isn't Stockholm syndrome it's programmer nirvana.

You can't remember arcane keystroke combinations and yet you like Eclipse? While I admit it's no emacs in the keystroke department, it is very inconsistent with pretty much every other UI tool out there in terms of keystrokes.

Powerful tool, but the "we'll go our own way despite commonly accepted UI standards" has always made me a little crazy.

Haha yep

Vmware + linux + unity mode. Vmware Workstation has always been very seamless with things like copy/paste between the guest and host. Havent used Virtualbox for a few years but I'm sure thats ok too.

...what do you accomplish with all this? I was forced to use Windows at work once so I had a Linux Virtualbox to do specific tasks, but it's not at all an ideal setup. I'm not sure what the advantage is over just using Linux as your host OS.

All I'm saying is that if you have to use a winbox for work (because of corporate/it policy), then getting nix tools via WMVware and Unity Mode is quite a good experience.

VirtualBox running linux server, share folders with Windows host, PuTTY

I don't know, for me Far Manager for Windows seems way more useful than Midnight Manager for Linux.

Cross-compilers[1]. Treat Windows as a strange embedded platform and target it from Linux.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW

To be fair, this is how people with tiling window managers feel about the rest. It's just another step further.

PowerShell

Powershell, Powershell, Powershell! Seriously, people, if you have to use a windows system, put some time into learning Powershell.

* Most simple grep and sed commands are entirely do-able. Bit more verbose syntax, but that comes with a hell of a lot of easy-to-access power

* It's all about objects, rather than plain text. This can often be a pain, but Import-Csv and Export-Csv are utter LOVE. Adding additional new properties could be easier, but it is an option and can be used to great effect

* It's basically .Net for the command line, and you can get to all the power locked away in the .Net libraries

* No installation required on modern windows machines. Assuming your network admins are not overly restrictive, you get a proper shell without having to install cygwin

I can get used to the verbosity, but the archaic block editing copy/paste makes Powershell painful to use for anything more than the basics. Copying multiline text in Powershell first requires pasting it into an intermediary text editor and fixing up the new lines. And since the commands are so verbose, more often than not a command will span multiple lines.

You should switch to using ConEmu[0] as a terminal. Completely fixes the rectangular copy blocks. Just set it up to launch PowerShell as your default shell.

[0] http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Indeed, Powershell is awesome.

But Cygwin is also usefull ;)

Cygwin :)

When future arrived we just did not miss it. GUIs are more natural, it's much better then learning each tools crappy mini console DSL.

> When future arrived we just did not miss it.

This might hold water were it not for the fact that pretty much all console unix tool users started off on Windows or Mac.

> GUIs are more natural, it's much better then learning each tools crappy mini console DSL.

Yes, GUIs are more natural. But for most of us, the time spent learning how to use common unix tools pays for itself very quickly by increasing productivity: it's an investment.

GUIs are more natural people who are not software developers.

I recommend installing Console 2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

And msysgit (https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+inst...) which includes the "git bash" shell. It's got almost all the basic unix tools installed by default.

I moved to consoleZ: https://github.com/cbucher/console

Its a fork of console2.

+ Adds Splitting Tabs into views

Console2 development seems to have slowed down.

I moved to ConEmu: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ from Console2 at work. I find that to be even more feature rich than Terminator for Linux which I use at home.

If you're forced to use Windows and need a terminal, I recommend running Cygwin's xterm with a rootless (i.e. no "root" background window, so windows share a desktop) X server. It's a lot better than running Cygwin's bash in cmd.exe.

I did this for a while, but mintty is good enough now and comes in Cygwin's standard packages.

It's been a while since I've used Cygwin (using Linux Mint for everything except gaming and music editing now), so I hadn't even heard of mintty. I'll check it out if I find a need for a good console in Windows again.

rxvt is also a good choice.

Among the first things I wanted to find when I bought and paid for (yes) Windows NT ... over 15 years ago now. I'd heard it was all multi-user and powerful like Unix.

The terminal _sucked_. It was the same crappy DOS box I'd seen since, well, DOS days and Win3.1.

That lead me on an exploration of MKS, UWIN, Cygwin, and finally, Red Hat, over the course of a few months. And I realized Linux Didn't Suck.

Another few months and I wiped NT off my hardrives and repartitioned with RH. Never looked back.

It's both the shell and the terminal software that's awful.

Conemu comes pretty close to solving the terminal software problem, and there are alternatie shells, e.g. Powershell or bash from cygwin.

the windows console sucks, but there are a couple of tools that keep you from throwing your workstation out of the window:

readline completion à la bash: http://code.google.com/p/clink/

nice console emulator with tabs: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

gnu tools on windows without cygwin: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki

not perfect, but actually usable...

shameless plug http://bliker.github.io/cmder/ Not really that bad

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