9 ms·

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

by cyborb 13y ago

dredmorbius 13y ago
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.
mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
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?
- astrobe_ 13y ago
  IDEs and Stockholm syndrome.
  - zafodbeeblebrox 13y ago
    Haha yep
  - jebblue 13y ago
    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.
    - GrinningFool 13y ago
      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.
- sseveran 13y ago
  PowerShell
  - mdisraeli 13y ago
    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
    - NicoJuicy 13y ago
      Indeed, Powershell is awesome. But Cygwin is also usefull ;)
    - zenzen 13y ago
      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.
      - ragesh 13y ago
        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/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
- AlexDanger 13y ago
  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.
  - cheapsteak 13y ago
    VirtualBox running linux server, share folders with Windows host, PuTTY
  - eean 13y ago
    ...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.
    - AlexDanger 13y ago
      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.
- maxst 13y ago
  I don't know, for me Far Manager for Windows seems way more useful than Midnight Manager for Linux.
- nkerkin 13y ago
  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.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    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.
    - nkerkin 13y ago
      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.
- _random_ 13y ago
  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.
  - radio4fan 13y ago
    > 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.
  - VMG 13y ago
    GUIs are more natural people who are not software developers.
- rwmj 13y ago
  Cross-compilers[1]. Treat Windows as a strange embedded platform and target it from Linux. [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
- NicoJuicy 13y ago
  Cygwin :)
- 59nadir 13y ago
  To be fair, this is how people with tiling window managers feel about the rest. It's just another step further.
nitrogen 13y ago
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.
- eropple 13y ago
  I did this for a while, but mintty is good enough now and comes in Cygwin's standard packages.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    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.
    - Syssiphus 13y ago
      rxvt is also a good choice.
kybernetikos 13y ago
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.
steveridout 13y ago
I recommend installing Console 2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ And msysgit (https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+installer+official+git 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.
- alanl 13y ago
  I moved to consoleZ: https://github.com/cbucher/console https://github.com/cbucher/console Its a fork of console2. + Adds Splitting Tabs into views Console2 development seems to have slowed down.
  - dewaka 13y ago
    I moved to ConEmu: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ 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.
bliker 13y ago
shameless plug http://bliker.github.io/cmder/ http://bliker.github.io/cmder/ Not really that bad
factorizer 13y ago
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/ http://code.google.com/p/clink/ nice console emulator with tabs: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ gnu tools on windows without cygwin: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki not perfect, but actually usable...

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

by cyborb 13y ago

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

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.

mkmkmmmmm 13y ago

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?

astrobe_ 13y ago
IDEs and Stockholm syndrome.
- zafodbeeblebrox 13y ago
  Haha yep
- jebblue 13y ago
  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.
  - GrinningFool 13y ago
    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.
sseveran 13y ago
PowerShell
- mdisraeli 13y ago
  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
  - NicoJuicy 13y ago
    Indeed, Powershell is awesome. But Cygwin is also usefull ;)
  - zenzen 13y ago
    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.
    - ragesh 13y ago
      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/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
AlexDanger 13y ago
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.
- cheapsteak 13y ago
  VirtualBox running linux server, share folders with Windows host, PuTTY
- eean 13y ago
  ...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.
  - AlexDanger 13y ago
    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.
maxst 13y ago
I don't know, for me Far Manager for Windows seems way more useful than Midnight Manager for Linux.
nkerkin 13y ago
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.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  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.
  - nkerkin 13y ago
    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.
_random_ 13y ago
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.
- radio4fan 13y ago
  > 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.
- VMG 13y ago
  GUIs are more natural people who are not software developers.
rwmj 13y ago
Cross-compilers[1]. Treat Windows as a strange embedded platform and target it from Linux. [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
NicoJuicy 13y ago
Cygwin :)
59nadir 13y ago
To be fair, this is how people with tiling window managers feel about the rest. It's just another step further.

nitrogen 13y ago

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.

eropple 13y ago
I did this for a while, but mintty is good enough now and comes in Cygwin's standard packages.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  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.
  - Syssiphus 13y ago
    rxvt is also a good choice.

kybernetikos 13y ago

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.

steveridout 13y ago

I recommend installing Console 2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ And msysgit (https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+installer+official+git 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.

alanl 13y ago
I moved to consoleZ: https://github.com/cbucher/console https://github.com/cbucher/console Its a fork of console2. + Adds Splitting Tabs into views Console2 development seems to have slowed down.
- dewaka 13y ago
  I moved to ConEmu: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ 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.

bliker 13y ago

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

factorizer 13y ago

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/ http://code.google.com/p/clink/ nice console emulator with tabs: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ gnu tools on windows without cygwin: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki not perfect, but actually usable...