Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

For me, Cygwin makes Windows bearable. It's still Windows, but, at least, it has a proper shell, interpreters, compilers, compressors (no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!) and so on. For the same reason you need MacPorts or Brew on a Mac, you need Cygwin on Windows.

Unless you are happy to spend your day in Visual Studio, in which case Cygwin will not be that useful.

View on HN

Windows has had a proper shell for a while now, in the form of PowerShell. It's quite different from the standard Unix shell, and I'm nowhere near as productive in it as I am in Bash, but that's more a function of lack of familiarity than any weaknesses of the shell. In fact, I'd say that it's actually much nicer than unix-y shells for a wide variety of tasks.

All I really find missing these days is good line-editing, and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

Do you know how to echo text in ASCII or UTF-8? > "text" or > echo "text" For me both come out with weird character encoding

> All I really find missing these days is good line-editing

Probably familiar enough for bash people:

https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

> and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

Not a terminal emulator (although I think it can do Terminal escape sequences if needed):

https://github.com/Maximus5/ConEmu

I knew about ConEmu (though I'm not 100% happy with it either). I'll take a look at PSReadLine, thanks.

It's still not a terminal emulator, but you can use Clink [1] to get readline in cmd. Works great with ConEmu or as part of cmder, as others have mentioned.

[1]: http://mridgers.github.io/clink/

Very high ROI. Removes a lot of stress you got just typing cmd.exe.

> and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

On Cygwin, try MinTTY. The default cmd.exe console is horrendous. This is derived from PuTTY and much, much nicer.

You can even use MinTTY with cmd.exe (and probably powershell) for dramatically improved user experience.

And, you can also find MinTTY standalone separate from the burden of cygwin. I got it from the msys project.

However great powershell is, the fact that bash is so universal everywhere else makes it too hard for me to use. With Cygwin I can often move seamlessly between Linux, OSX and Windows without changing anything I do, including all the utility scripts I write etc.

> It's quite different from the standard Unix shell

And that's the issue. Most people don't want to relearn everything, and I don't see why MS had to reinvent the wheel.

> WinZip or WinRAR

Everyone uses 7Zip now which has a very good command line version and is OSS/free (mostly LGPL licensed, but some of their source code is licenced otherwise because it is from third parties).

Plus Powershell can zip/unzip using the shell.application.Namespace API if you wish. I prefer 7zip myself, but Windows handles basic zip files fine.

Explorer does too when not at command-line.

>(no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!)

I'd be surprised if compressor utilities running through Cygwin's emulation layer could achieve the same speed as a native tool. 7-zip is an open source tool that will handle all your compression / decompression needs on Windows (including rar, gz, many self-extracting exes, and a bunch of very exotic formats). You should really give it a try if you're compressing or decompressing large archives on Windows.

http://www.7-zip.org/

> I'd be surprised if compressor utilities running through Cygwin's emulation layer could achieve the same speed as a native tool.

Why do you think so? The emulation layer should only be relevant for the IO part of the compressors and IO is usually severely limited by the harddisk anyway.

Cygwin should only slow down syscalls. Syscalls should not be a significant fraction of the running time of compression software.

cygwin is fine, but if you want to spend most of your time in bash or using software designed for Unix you probably shouldn't be using Windows in the first place.

Unless you need Windows just slightly more than you need Linux, or your hardware doesn't work properly under Linux, or you need software that Linux, even Wine, can't run. Or your processor isn't even capable of booting Linux, but it can run Windows (Intel Atom Bay Trail comes to mind).

--edit apparently Bay Trail does support Linux. The big hype when it was launched was that it would not, that's where my confusion came in

I mean, no problem, but, ultimately, cygwin is walled off from certain parts of the system and you're just going to have to deal with the fact that WinNT has major differences from Linux for some tasks. I use cygwin sometimes too but it makes more sense "in addition to" than "instead of."

actually I'm pretty sure Bay Trail do run Linux.

Linux runs on Bay Trail, e.g. https://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet-a-fedora-remix-for-bay-...

the problem was the 32 bit UEFI. Also solved: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/155557/installing-li...

Unless your business requires software which only runs on Windows, and using cygwin allows you to do a lot of things better on Windows, and lets you do a lot of things cross platform that would be a waste of time to implement two ways.

I'd be more inclined to agree with you if you'd ended that statement with "... designed for Unix, perhaps you should consider whether you should be using Windows in the first place".

There are a lot of people out there that have to use Windows for a variety of reasons, but are glad to be able to do some shell-related things on it in a unix-like shell.

I'm a bit split at this point.. in general, I have an ubuntu server VM running (with docker), with my home directory mounted via samba as a drive in windows, and have a couple conemu tabs open ssh'd into the VM... I can continue to edit in windows, but run in Linux.

At least for my stuff that will run in Linux (node/iojs and golang) targeting docker containers, it works well.

A lot of people are stuck at jobs where they need Windows for some reason or another (maybe simply because their boss says so). In those cases, Cygwin makes their life bearable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com