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Comment by _xhok | Hacker News Reader

While part of me still wants to tell would-be hackers to just switch to OS X or Linux, I've realized recently that a lot of hackers are bound to Windows because they use various software that only works on Windows, like games, or because of social limitations.

I have no clue how good Babun is, but I have no clue how I ever got anything done on Windows without a Unix shell. Cygwin is not out-of-the-box enough, and the package manager is buggy. If Babun really works, I think it will matter a lot.

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I'm on Mac so don't bite my head off.

That said, I was much more productive on Windows for many things. You mentioned games. Game development is much larger on Windows. More access to more engines, tech, examples, tools, etc.

Visual Studio's debugger still blows away anything I've seen on Mac or Linux. PIX, Microsoft's GPU debugger is still the standard to be met.

.NET, C# and Windows Forms were amazing ways to bang out tools for artists and designers that I've seen no match for on other platforms yet.

I guess the short of that is, it really depends on what you're working on.

But I'm still amazed that those things are missing on other platforms. It's not like Visual Studio is some new product. It's been arguably the best debugger for 15+ years? It's surprising that no one as duplicated it on other platforms.

Same with Windows Forms. Sure there are UI libraries but none of them have that perfect storm of features that makes banging out certain kinds of apps so easy. I'm guessing the most used features are Windows Forms Property editor (point it at a class, get instant interface to edit all of the class's properties). Another is probably their data grid editor.

So yea, I love me some unix shell but I'd prefer not to have to choose a good shell vs good other things.

That is a good point. Visual Studio is actually one of the things I have positive emotions about from my Windows days.

I'm a self-taught programmer. I've basically been using linux 99% of the time for the past five years, and just have a partition that runs windows if I need it. Funnily enough, the first real programming gig I landed is a full time job doing full stack .NET development, so now it's sort of flipped around. I do miss the command line. I'll have to check this out. I've been looking for a good windows shell replacement.

The other thing worth looking at is the MinGW project. It's pretty easy to get started with the mingw-get package manager (there's an installer you can find here: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started).

Once you have mintty running as your terminal emulator, and a decent shell like bash, life gets a whole lot easier.

The upside is that it's fully native without Cygwin's compatibility layer. The downside is that it won't have as many ported utilities (and probably not as easy to get started with as something like Babun).

http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ seems like it still uses cygwin1.dll (or whatever it's called these days). Am I missing something?

Yes, you are missing the MSYS build listed on their download page. It does not use Cygwin.

MSYS/Mingw are native ports of the GNU software tools and friends.

You should take a serious look at using powershell, they've aliased a lot of commands to what you expect on linux so you're not completely foreign and it's got a similar workflow mentality you're used to i.e pipe commands.

And you can work with .NET natively.

That said it is NOT to imitate linux, it's conceptually not the same which is good because Windows isn't either.

Here's a 101; commands are `verb-noun -parameter value` these pipe | objects(!) not strings. The first thing you should do is win+R powershell type: get-alias and after that `get-help ls` just drop in powershell wherever you used to calling cmd and see how it goes.

Another word of advice: Try to use the pipeline as much as possible. Passing objects through the pipeline is a core concept of PowerShell for a reason. Don't try writing C# with PowerShell syntax (as I see so many people do on Stack Overflow).

Some answers I have written on SO that exemplify that:

• http://stackoverflow.com/a/7394766/73070

• http://stackoverflow.com/a/1046291/73070

• http://stackoverflow.com/a/14481495/73070

I just glanced at the top post you have linked here (I'll definitely take a look at the others later). At first glance it reminds me of unix pipes, clojure's thrush operator, and F#'s pipe forward operator. (they're all different from one another, of course, but the general idea of threading data through pipes/filter/transformations to get what you want)

If I'm not totally missing the mark there, and that's the idiomatic way to do things, I'm glad. I really prefer dealing with scripting/command line stuff that way.

Really appreciate the information!

Powershell is a great language. I would love to see unix shells inspired by it.

The associated toolset, on the other hand, is clearly not there yet. As soon as you start doing real things with PowerShell, you will hit all sorts of bugs and limitations.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Remoting and signing has been a nightmare to set up on my domain but otherwise so far I'm still having a pleasant experience. Obviously the console itself is the same as cmd's which is terrible. I just work a lot with the ISE open but still looking for a slicker terminal.

I've been able to just deploy PS v4.0 across all of my computers I think a lot of the headache comes from trying to use new stuff and seeing windows 7 ship with v2.0

I'm curious what kind of things you're running into, I'm getting quite immersed in using PS all over.

Well, what you said, crappy console, no ssh (the powershell equivalent is just not very good), but also, no grep (findstr is not a good substitute), no rsync, etc.

Whatever I've attempted I've always hit unexpected walls due to the unavailability of tools we take for granted with linux.

I'll parrot one of the PS developers;

"grep, sed and awk etc are really great on nix because they're great with text, they're text based operating systems and you can do anything with them. Windows is an API based system so just moving text around doesn't get you very far."

There's a mountain of filters available in the cmdlets parameters but specifically since you mentioned grep. findstr is not powershell it's in the old cmd family of programs still in your PATH. You want to look at select-string http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849903.aspx

I wish MS would include SSH but the party line is they've no idea who really wrote the code and they won't include it in windows in case they get sued over it.

Well, I'm on Windows because I don't bother. It's just my workplace machine, running browsers, terminals (so thanks Babun, will try it out now) and a bit of other stuff I don't need Linux for. Yes, my private notebook runs Linux. All my servers do. But our IT departement is Windows centric, and that's about that. While I'm free to configure my desktop machine just the way I want, I prefer to not spend time doing this. I just use the Windows system they gave me, and when it breaks, I call in and they will give me an off-the-shelf new one. Not in a mood to spend my time with fiddling with my desktop machine. The most complex piece of software it runs is the browser.

I haven't been gaming lately nearly as much as I've used to, but it's still a big part of my computing needs and I just can't get good enough performance in Linux even though PlayOnLinux really has made installing games easier.

I'd love nothing more than run Linux as my main OS, but I hate having to reboot whenever I feel like playing a game.

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