Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

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> How do people cope without a decent terminal?

The same way you do on a mac! You are using a virtual machine to mimic your production environment, right?

I have Win8 desktop and MBPr laptop and develop on both about 70/30. Brew is nice and all (tho has made me howl in frustration numerous times) but I want stuff running on the exact same software as what I deploy.

Between work and pleasure I use a mix of PHP, Ruby, Java, Node, and Python (well and Haskell.. hello coworker! /wave). Not that I actively develop in all of those but will use other programs written in them and sometimes modify the source. CLI on mac is better than cygwin on PC, but I have had hiccups with both getting the right packages/libraries installed. OSX is far from the holy land imo.

I never have a hair pulling event on Ubuntu installing things, sadly I am too frustrated with the NON-CLI parts of Ubuntu to make it my primary OS.

I have all of those languages installed "natively" (ie not through cygwin) on Windows so linting works in Intellij. For SPAs I can use bower,grunt,gulp,livereload etc in cygwin just as easily as OSX. I've not tried installing Haskell on windows, I run that in my VM exclusively.

Right now my biggest gripe is Ansible is a b to get working in windows, but it can work. Hopefully the "run ansible on host" PR gets merged soon into Vagrant.

> You are using a virtual machine to mimic your production environment, right?

Assuming you have a production environment, and that said environment is running a full OS. Not everyone is a web or mobile developer.

So, do you have an emulator, or are you running open-loop?

Depends on what I am working on.

In my first position, where I was the EE, the software development was done with a combination of an emulator, a VAX build system[1], and live hardware via JTAG.

In my second position I was doing signal processing algorithm R&D, so there was no production system at all.

In my third position I was implementing stuff from the second position and other sources. Our software was (supposedly) platform-agnostic, so we did our development in RHEL and ran on various platforms with various flavors of Linux. There we had examples of real hardware, but had not constructed a full-example production system when I left. All the Linux installs on target hardware were heavily stripped down and configured for real-time operation, though, so we couldn't actually do development on them.

Now I'm doing a combination of R&D, packaged software, and bespoke software for NLP where our customers can run (theoretically) on whatever systems they want. I develop in Ubuntu LTS and test occasionally in a Windows 7 VM. Our customers so far run our software on various flavors of Windows, RHEL, or Ubuntu VMs that we package for them. We don't really have a defined "production system".

[1] This was in 1993, well before I came along

>The same way you do on a mac!

But my Mac has a decent terminal.

So does Windows - Powershell. If that's not good enough, then ConEmu

What if your production environment is Windows? They it doesn't matter. You have to use Visual Studio and the horrible terminal.

OSX has a decent terminal. Windows has not.

It has been stated here, most of the developers who are working heavily in Windows environment (myself included) use ConEmu. There are tools out there that do make Windows a productive environment.

Windows does suffer from short-comings but do not tell me OS X or Linux do not.

+1 for ConEmu. It's a life saver on Windows. I know it's a religious issue, M$ vs <whatever> but it is still kinda valid.

I work with some talented C# developers but I'm always thinking in the back of my mind : "what compels you to only develop for windows?".

ConEmu doesn't solve the problem, as it's still using the Windows cmd.exe. Someone who's used to a UNIX terminal is likely used to something like bash or zsh. ConEmu doesn't give them that.

ConEmu has a tab for Powershell, and powershell does provide enough power to do scripting. If you are Unix developer, do not expect a one-to-one mapping on windows side. Treat using different OS like visiting a new country. There are many things similar but something subtly and some things starkly different.

bash and zsh are CLI. They are not terminals. Just run bash in ConEmu.

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