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You can choose either Cmder by itself or a bundled installer that includes msysgit. I set my default "new console" to that bundled bash and things work pretty g

by Encosia 12y ago

You can choose either Cmder by itself or a bundled installer that includes msysgit. I set my default "new console" to that bundled bash and things work pretty great. Start + "cmd" and I'm at a bash prompt in a fairly nice console emulator. Most people install a better terminal emulator to replace OS X's default terminal app anyway, so we're all installing something to get a nice experience. I really haven't missed any of my Mac's command line friendliness when on my Windows machines using Cmder. Chocolatey is a fairly popular apt/yum equivalent on Windows. Most anything built on Node, like npm, bower, or jspm, works fine too. Could things be better? Sure. Every platform has room for improvement in areas. As a developer primarily using Windows here, my day-to-day experience just doesn't seem anywhere nearly as bleak as you're describing though.

kenshaw 12y ago
I didn't say it was bleak. The difference is that on Linux/OSX you don't need to install extra tools like mysysgit/cgywin or a different terminal emulator (ie, Cmndr or other 'Terminal' replacement on OSX), because the toolset is already there (bash, awk, sed, etc). Also, the thing here is that it's not optimal, and there's also non-trivial licensing costs when building large continuous integration/deployment systems. Additionally, I don't believe you would be very supportive of the experience on Windows if you were more familiar with what is possible on Linux, OSX or any other Unix, and if you had strong understanding/knowledge/command of the toolsets available on those ecosystems. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with using Windows as a regular desktop environment (I'm forced to almost every day). It's actually a fairly good experience (from a desktop perspective), but it doesn't give developers and system admins true, powerful out of the box toolsets. For instance, installing PostgreSQL/MySQL/Apache/Nginx/or whatever on Windows is extremely painful, cumbersome, and not standardized across systems. Conversely, compare this: (yum|apt-get|port) install (postgresql|mysql|apache|nginx). To do proper automation on large sets of Windows systems, you need Windows Server, Active Directory, and Domains properly setup configured, and licensed, especially if you have any kind of security policy and need to push / control updates from a central server and keep strict control of / standardized versions across systems (for instance, in a strict, actually PCI compliant environment). Why bother with any of that when all of that mess / problem is taken care of by your distribution (OSX/Linux/etc), as one would expect it to be. There's no dependency graphs with large sets of Unix-likes, unlike in the Windows ecosystem -- and that really is the main issue here.
- Encosia 12y ago
  > The difference is that on Linux/OSX you don't need to install extra tools like mysysgit/cgywin or a different terminal emulator (ie, Cmndr or other 'Terminal' replacement on OSX), because the toolset is already there (bash, awk, sed, etc). Of course you're right that things like bash aren't present on a fresh install of Windows. I just don't see much issue with needing to run one Cmder install though, because I know almost no one who uses the built-in terminal app on OS X either. Installing your preferred terminal is somewhere around step 2, after installing your preferred browser. At that point, it's a wash. > Additionally, I don't believe you would be very supportive of the experience on Windows if you were more familiar with what is possible on Linux, OSX or any other Unix, and if you had strong understanding/knowledge/command of the toolsets available on those ecosystems. That's a huge assumption. Over the years, I've spent a ton of time with everything from DOS 1.0, to the Amiga CLI + REXX, to Solaris and AIX, to Slackware/RedHat/Ubuntu, to OS X, and to Windows. I first learned assembly on SGI Indigos running Irix and first accessed the web via Mosaic running on SPARCstations. I feel fairly confident in my perspective when it comes to the nuances of various platforms, but I currently prefer Windows. I mean this in the least confrontational way possible, but that's precisely the kind of off puttingly patronizing "you'd understand if you didn't use Windows" shtick I often see from Mac/Linux users that motivates me to comment on these threads. Heck, just last weekend I was ripping a buggy apt-installed xcache out of the Ubuntu/Linode apache server that hosts my blog and replacing it with a compiled .so to fix a bizarre edge case where xcache was breaking one of my WordPress plugins (and sucked up two weeks, on and off, of debugging with the plugin's author). In my experience, these type of opaque problems are tremendously more common on *nix than on a modern Windows Server. BTW, I use ssh from the Cmder command line when I log in to that Linode VPS, just like you might from the command line on any other platform. > For instance, installing PostgreSQL/MySQL/Apache/Nginx/or whatever on Windows is extremely painful, cumbersome, and not standardized across systems. Conversely, compare this: (yum|apt-get|port) install (postgresql|mysql|apache|nginx). Come on. No one who has ever installed any of those things in production would pretend it's so simple. You're going to spend so much time on configuration that the difference between apt-get and running an .msi is negligible.
  - kenshaw 12y ago

by Encosia 12y ago

kenshaw 12y ago

I didn't say it was bleak. The difference is that on Linux/OSX you don't need to install extra tools like mysysgit/cgywin or a different terminal emulator (ie, Cmndr or other 'Terminal' replacement on OSX), because the toolset is already there (bash, awk, sed, etc). Also, the thing here is that it's not optimal, and there's also non-trivial licensing costs when building large continuous integration/deployment systems. Additionally, I don't believe you would be very supportive of the experience on Windows if you were more familiar with what is possible on Linux, OSX or any other Unix, and if you had strong understanding/knowledge/command of the toolsets available on those ecosystems. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with using Windows as a regular desktop environment (I'm forced to almost every day). It's actually a fairly good experience (from a desktop perspective), but it doesn't give developers and system admins true, powerful out of the box toolsets. For instance, installing PostgreSQL/MySQL/Apache/Nginx/or whatever on Windows is extremely painful, cumbersome, and not standardized across systems. Conversely, compare this: (yum|apt-get|port) install (postgresql|mysql|apache|nginx). To do proper automation on large sets of Windows systems, you need Windows Server, Active Directory, and Domains properly setup configured, and licensed, especially if you have any kind of security policy and need to push / control updates from a central server and keep strict control of / standardized versions across systems (for instance, in a strict, actually PCI compliant environment). Why bother with any of that when all of that mess / problem is taken care of by your distribution (OSX/Linux/etc), as one would expect it to be. There's no dependency graphs with large sets of Unix-likes, unlike in the Windows ecosystem -- and that really is the main issue here.

Encosia 12y ago
> The difference is that on Linux/OSX you don't need to install extra tools like mysysgit/cgywin or a different terminal emulator (ie, Cmndr or other 'Terminal' replacement on OSX), because the toolset is already there (bash, awk, sed, etc). Of course you're right that things like bash aren't present on a fresh install of Windows. I just don't see much issue with needing to run one Cmder install though, because I know almost no one who uses the built-in terminal app on OS X either. Installing your preferred terminal is somewhere around step 2, after installing your preferred browser. At that point, it's a wash. > Additionally, I don't believe you would be very supportive of the experience on Windows if you were more familiar with what is possible on Linux, OSX or any other Unix, and if you had strong understanding/knowledge/command of the toolsets available on those ecosystems. That's a huge assumption. Over the years, I've spent a ton of time with everything from DOS 1.0, to the Amiga CLI + REXX, to Solaris and AIX, to Slackware/RedHat/Ubuntu, to OS X, and to Windows. I first learned assembly on SGI Indigos running Irix and first accessed the web via Mosaic running on SPARCstations. I feel fairly confident in my perspective when it comes to the nuances of various platforms, but I currently prefer Windows. I mean this in the least confrontational way possible, but that's precisely the kind of off puttingly patronizing "you'd understand if you didn't use Windows" shtick I often see from Mac/Linux users that motivates me to comment on these threads. Heck, just last weekend I was ripping a buggy apt-installed xcache out of the Ubuntu/Linode apache server that hosts my blog and replacing it with a compiled .so to fix a bizarre edge case where xcache was breaking one of my WordPress plugins (and sucked up two weeks, on and off, of debugging with the plugin's author). In my experience, these type of opaque problems are tremendously more common on *nix than on a modern Windows Server. BTW, I use ssh from the Cmder command line when I log in to that Linode VPS, just like you might from the command line on any other platform. > For instance, installing PostgreSQL/MySQL/Apache/Nginx/or whatever on Windows is extremely painful, cumbersome, and not standardized across systems. Conversely, compare this: (yum|apt-get|port) install (postgresql|mysql|apache|nginx). Come on. No one who has ever installed any of those things in production would pretend it's so simple. You're going to spend so much time on configuration that the difference between apt-get and running an .msi is negligible.
- kenshaw 12y ago