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Windows has indeed missed the text-mode boat big time. Eventually I think people naturally gravitate to running Linux with Windows in a virtual machine. I remem

by yogo 13y ago

Windows has indeed missed the text-mode boat big time. Eventually I think people naturally gravitate to running Linux with Windows in a virtual machine. I remember trying many of the tools mentioned in the article and it always never quite felt right. A lot of the niceness could be attributed to a combination of bash, readline, and the accompanying *nix tools--the experience just isn't the same in Windows. Having terminals open in front of you in something like terminator is simply a joy in Linux.

ericcholis 13y ago
I think this lends heavily into the reasons why development on OSX has become so popular. Devs were dying for a functionally attractive alternative to Linux, but Windows didn't offer the proper environment. Heck, as a primary Windows user I've been contemplating switching to OSX for development. P.S. While Cygwin is nice, I've always felt like it was a clunky alternative that was shoe-horned into Windows.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Cygwin is strapped on the back of Windows or something. It doesn't try to fit in or play along (which is fine, it's a portability layer). For tools, the stuff from the GnuWin project fits into a cmd shell better than Cygwin (in my experience anyway): http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I've recently dumped my Windows environment. Switched from a massive powerful tower with multiple monitors to a single Macbook Pro Retina 15". My workflow is much faster now due to gestures and learning hotkeys, much more portable, works better, faster than my desktop. I can work remotely anywhere I want too which is amazing. OS X is great for development. Besides gaming, I really don't see a point to using Windows ever again really. The UI is so much nicer, gestures save me a lot of time (quickly launch an application, view desktop, switch between spaces), combined without having to do any workarounds (working remotely on a Linux server) to get things running. Love having a native terminal as well.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Cygwin is my primary means of interfacing with Windows, and combined with a bunch of shim scripts I've built up over the years, I get a very similar experience across Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris. I actually prefer a Cygwin terminal on Windows to a Rxvt or similar lightweight terminal in X Window. The biggest pain in Linux is the selection buffer. With Console2 on Windows, selecting text puts it in the clipboard buffer, and you can then select a bunch of text in your IDE and overwrite it with a paste. The same workflow doesn't work at all well in Linux; first you must delete the text in the IDE, then select the text in the console, then very carefully aim where you want the text inserted and fire with the middle mouse button. Even worse, IDEs like RubyMine clobber the selection buffer for common operations like Ctrl+Shift+N (Navigate | File); not only does it clobber the buffer, but it hides the window if it loses focus, so it's actually impossible to copy text from an rxvt terminal into its search box! As a practical web development environment, I think Linux is the way to go to minimize the distance to production. But my preferred means of interacting with Linux is ssh, either to a VM or over the network, from a nicer desktop OS. Which for me is Windows.
  - WayneDB 13y ago
    > Cygwin is my primary means of interfacing with Windows... Could you explain that a little more? For instance - say you want to browse the web or read email - you're doing it in a Cygwin terminal? Do you use it as your launcher to launch Windows apps or do you only run text interface applications? Or, do you just do most of your dev/sysadmin work in Cygwin and use normal Windows apps for the rest?
    - barrkel 13y ago
      I mean I have 7 terminals (many also running screen) open on my desktop - more windows than all other apps combined; and almost all interaction with the OS, by which I mostly mean process and file management, is via the command line. My browser is relegated to a secondary window alongside my service monitoring and ssh terminals. When I write new utilities, they are usually command-line based. If I can get away with it, I'll put together a bash script built out of pipelines of Unix utilities and various others I've written over the years. I'm reluctant to write for-purpose apps; I try to make them fit into a Unix-style paradigm of streams combined with some command-line options. For example, I recently wrote a simple video editor to select clips from my motorbike commuting videos. The only platform-specific bit is the video player, and all it does is respond to keyboard commands to navigate backwards and forwards and mark positions, in response to which it writes out text to standard out. I have other scripts which drive ffmpeg or other utilities as necessary to do the heavy lifting of cutting and composing. And to port it to another OS, all I need write anew is a video-playing component. And things like parallelization for efficiency, process isolation for resilience, and job control to temporarily reduce CPU usage (perhaps to avoid overheating on reencode!) are trivial. For work, all my testing is done from the command-line, much of the code tweaks, all source control, merge resolution, grep / sed / etc. Debugging is usually done with repls like pry for Ruby. Browser at work is primarily used for distraction while having a coffee and waiting for tests to run, or to interact with company web apps. Things like web browsers (Firefox in my case, because of tree-style tabs more than anything else) are invariant across platforms. If you live entirely in the browser, you don't need to deal with, or even know anything about, the machine's OS. So I don't really consider that use case an interaction.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  Agreed about Cygwin. I used it for years out of necessity, but I don't like when people suggest it as a remedy for Windows's anemic command line. Cygwin adds a tiny amount of what is needed. For one thing, Cygwin can't do anything about the terminal emulator, which is very weak.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    Are you using MinTTY or the native cmd.exe-like terminal? MinTTY is based on PuTTY code and is quite reasonable (and a major improvement over the standard Windows way.
- yogo 13y ago
  Yep, Cygwin is good if you have no other options, but it's like running Wine on Linux, i.e. some things might work but it's not surprising if they don't work (or work the way they should).
upthedale 13y ago
Yep, I've been advocating running a headless nix VM on Windows for a while now, where you can easily 'shoosh' in (as Hanselman likes to call it - never heard this before myself). The problem comes when you want the *nix tooling to interact with the Windows environment. Personally I like the clear separation between the host and guest environments, but YMMV. At the very least you can mount some share the Windows host provides inside the guest OS.
- H3g3m0n 13y ago
  Cygwins not bad if you just want a shell. It does Xorg too, but it's not fantastic. The main problem is not all programs will work on it (no tmux, but screen is ok), or be in the repos (I actually made an attempt to get Arch's makepkg/pacman working on it, but quite a few deps wouldn't compile properly, gpgme failed tests for example). I think it would be great to have a tightly integrated VM. There are some that allow you to open Linux X apps in a Windows desktop rather than confined to a VM Window. Perhaps we could get a Wayland/Mir port for Windows. Run the VM in the background but have a full Linux desktop environment. Might need a shim layer or some remote desktop extensions.
- a3n 13y ago
  I've used Vagrant for this, and it works pretty well, including sharing directories between the host and guest. But of course you don't get to run Windows programs from within the VM, you only get to manipulate Windows files with Linux programs. So it's not a 100% substitute for a Windows shell.
WayneDB 13y ago
I think a lot more people run Linux as a guest than the other way around.
- yogo 13y ago
  Yes, I would guess the same. However, I think people see it as a very big leap to jump over or the percentages would be different. Gaming, drivers (not as big a problem these days) and other specialized software also factor into this. The way I see it is that if you're working with code, especially open languages and platforms, Linux is a great fit and you should make the leap :).
  - npsimons 13y ago
    It's extremely telling that in the link to the Quine posted a few days back, the README listed a single apt-get command to install compilers/interpreters for 52 different programming languages. It's one of the reasons I love Linux (Debian in particular) - there's just so many toys included, not just for programming, but sys admin and science as well. Who needs games when you have that kind of power at your fingertips?
    - yogo 13y ago
      I definitely don't need games either. The other thing is that Windows is very graphical by default (understandable given that they are targeting the masses) but there isn't a built in way to make its presentation minimal[1], like stripping everything out and simply being able to launch what you need. This is easily achievable with a basic Openbox setup, with dmenu on top, boom! 1. There are probably customization tools out there that would let you get close to this but I don't believe it's truly possible just given desktop Windows' architecture.

by yogo 13y ago

ericcholis 13y ago

I think this lends heavily into the reasons why development on OSX has become so popular. Devs were dying for a functionally attractive alternative to Linux, but Windows didn't offer the proper environment. Heck, as a primary Windows user I've been contemplating switching to OSX for development. P.S. While Cygwin is nice, I've always felt like it was a clunky alternative that was shoe-horned into Windows.

maxerickson 13y ago
Cygwin is strapped on the back of Windows or something. It doesn't try to fit in or play along (which is fine, it's a portability layer). For tools, the stuff from the GnuWin project fits into a cmd shell better than Cygwin (in my experience anyway): http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
rfnslyr 13y ago
I've recently dumped my Windows environment. Switched from a massive powerful tower with multiple monitors to a single Macbook Pro Retina 15". My workflow is much faster now due to gestures and learning hotkeys, much more portable, works better, faster than my desktop. I can work remotely anywhere I want too which is amazing. OS X is great for development. Besides gaming, I really don't see a point to using Windows ever again really. The UI is so much nicer, gestures save me a lot of time (quickly launch an application, view desktop, switch between spaces), combined without having to do any workarounds (working remotely on a Linux server) to get things running. Love having a native terminal as well.
barrkel 13y ago
Cygwin is my primary means of interfacing with Windows, and combined with a bunch of shim scripts I've built up over the years, I get a very similar experience across Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris. I actually prefer a Cygwin terminal on Windows to a Rxvt or similar lightweight terminal in X Window. The biggest pain in Linux is the selection buffer. With Console2 on Windows, selecting text puts it in the clipboard buffer, and you can then select a bunch of text in your IDE and overwrite it with a paste. The same workflow doesn't work at all well in Linux; first you must delete the text in the IDE, then select the text in the console, then very carefully aim where you want the text inserted and fire with the middle mouse button. Even worse, IDEs like RubyMine clobber the selection buffer for common operations like Ctrl+Shift+N (Navigate | File); not only does it clobber the buffer, but it hides the window if it loses focus, so it's actually impossible to copy text from an rxvt terminal into its search box! As a practical web development environment, I think Linux is the way to go to minimize the distance to production. But my preferred means of interacting with Linux is ssh, either to a VM or over the network, from a nicer desktop OS. Which for me is Windows.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  > Cygwin is my primary means of interfacing with Windows... Could you explain that a little more? For instance - say you want to browse the web or read email - you're doing it in a Cygwin terminal? Do you use it as your launcher to launch Windows apps or do you only run text interface applications? Or, do you just do most of your dev/sysadmin work in Cygwin and use normal Windows apps for the rest?
  - barrkel 13y ago
    I mean I have 7 terminals (many also running screen) open on my desktop - more windows than all other apps combined; and almost all interaction with the OS, by which I mostly mean process and file management, is via the command line. My browser is relegated to a secondary window alongside my service monitoring and ssh terminals. When I write new utilities, they are usually command-line based. If I can get away with it, I'll put together a bash script built out of pipelines of Unix utilities and various others I've written over the years. I'm reluctant to write for-purpose apps; I try to make them fit into a Unix-style paradigm of streams combined with some command-line options. For example, I recently wrote a simple video editor to select clips from my motorbike commuting videos. The only platform-specific bit is the video player, and all it does is respond to keyboard commands to navigate backwards and forwards and mark positions, in response to which it writes out text to standard out. I have other scripts which drive ffmpeg or other utilities as necessary to do the heavy lifting of cutting and composing. And to port it to another OS, all I need write anew is a video-playing component. And things like parallelization for efficiency, process isolation for resilience, and job control to temporarily reduce CPU usage (perhaps to avoid overheating on reencode!) are trivial. For work, all my testing is done from the command-line, much of the code tweaks, all source control, merge resolution, grep / sed / etc. Debugging is usually done with repls like pry for Ruby. Browser at work is primarily used for distraction while having a coffee and waiting for tests to run, or to interact with company web apps. Things like web browsers (Firefox in my case, because of tree-style tabs more than anything else) are invariant across platforms. If you live entirely in the browser, you don't need to deal with, or even know anything about, the machine's OS. So I don't really consider that use case an interaction.
badman_ting 13y ago
Agreed about Cygwin. I used it for years out of necessity, but I don't like when people suggest it as a remedy for Windows's anemic command line. Cygwin adds a tiny amount of what is needed. For one thing, Cygwin can't do anything about the terminal emulator, which is very weak.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Are you using MinTTY or the native cmd.exe-like terminal? MinTTY is based on PuTTY code and is quite reasonable (and a major improvement over the standard Windows way.
yogo 13y ago
Yep, Cygwin is good if you have no other options, but it's like running Wine on Linux, i.e. some things might work but it's not surprising if they don't work (or work the way they should).

upthedale 13y ago

Yep, I've been advocating running a headless nix VM on Windows for a while now, where you can easily 'shoosh' in (as Hanselman likes to call it - never heard this before myself). The problem comes when you want the *nix tooling to interact with the Windows environment. Personally I like the clear separation between the host and guest environments, but YMMV. At the very least you can mount some share the Windows host provides inside the guest OS.

H3g3m0n 13y ago
Cygwins not bad if you just want a shell. It does Xorg too, but it's not fantastic. The main problem is not all programs will work on it (no tmux, but screen is ok), or be in the repos (I actually made an attempt to get Arch's makepkg/pacman working on it, but quite a few deps wouldn't compile properly, gpgme failed tests for example). I think it would be great to have a tightly integrated VM. There are some that allow you to open Linux X apps in a Windows desktop rather than confined to a VM Window. Perhaps we could get a Wayland/Mir port for Windows. Run the VM in the background but have a full Linux desktop environment. Might need a shim layer or some remote desktop extensions.
a3n 13y ago
I've used Vagrant for this, and it works pretty well, including sharing directories between the host and guest. But of course you don't get to run Windows programs from within the VM, you only get to manipulate Windows files with Linux programs. So it's not a 100% substitute for a Windows shell.

WayneDB 13y ago

I think a lot more people run Linux as a guest than the other way around.

yogo 13y ago
Yes, I would guess the same. However, I think people see it as a very big leap to jump over or the percentages would be different. Gaming, drivers (not as big a problem these days) and other specialized software also factor into this. The way I see it is that if you're working with code, especially open languages and platforms, Linux is a great fit and you should make the leap :).
- npsimons 13y ago
  It's extremely telling that in the link to the Quine posted a few days back, the README listed a single apt-get command to install compilers/interpreters for 52 different programming languages. It's one of the reasons I love Linux (Debian in particular) - there's just so many toys included, not just for programming, but sys admin and science as well. Who needs games when you have that kind of power at your fingertips?
  - yogo 13y ago
    I definitely don't need games either. The other thing is that Windows is very graphical by default (understandable given that they are targeting the masses) but there isn't a built in way to make its presentation minimal[1], like stripping everything out and simply being able to launch what you need. This is easily achievable with a basic Openbox setup, with dmenu on top, boom! 1. There are probably customization tools out there that would let you get close to this but I don't believe it's truly possible just given desktop Windows' architecture.