12 ms·
For all Balmer's thing of dancing on a stage and chanting "developers", there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer compan
by cturner 11y ago
For all Balmer's thing of dancing on a stage and chanting "developers", there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer company.
That has completely changed in the last eighteen months. Each time I think "wouldn't it be cool if" I'm finding a few weeks later that someone at Microsoft is well ahead of me. How much easier it will be to ship my sucky roguelikes to Windows users in this new world!
Hmm. They can now have a path to obsolete cmd. As long as they ship a decent ssh client with the system, users will become accustomed to ssh-ing to their own box instead of using cmd.
Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. 256 colour is fine, although 24-bit would be impressive. /proc would be cool, but also a big ask I assume. They already have a strong compiler. Make it really easy to find the hex fingerprint required to log on to the sshd-server. Something like inetd could be useful, too.
- baldfat 11y agoWishlist: mobaxterm - http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
- astazangasta 11y agoCygwin has all of those things and ssh server support.
- cturner 11y agoFair. But I couldn't target my crappy roguelikes at cygwin - requires complicated third-party installs. I ran cygwin-with-ssh heavily for a while in 2003. It was a hell of a thing to get it going. Then I had trouble getting it to work on a new computer and gave up. Shouldn't be surprised that it got good again.
- nacs 11y agoTry Babun [1] for a pre-configured Cygwin setup with an easy install. I've been using it for the past month or so and it works great. [1]: http://babun.github.io/ http://babun.github.io/
- Cyph0n 11y agoThat looks amazing. Thanks for the link.
- cactusface 11y agoAlternatively MSYS + MinGW + GCC / MSVC.
- lucb1e 11y ago> complicated third-party installs Wait, isn't that nearly everything you ever install on Windows? Not complicated per se, but everything is third party and not signed by people maintaining Windows (as with most GNU/Linux distributions).
- MartinCron 11y agoChocolately helps with at least the "complicated" part. Has helped me fall in love with Windows (7) again.
- 72deluxe 11y agoDon't MSI packages help?
- zymhan 11y agoI don't know many sysadmins who would use Cygwin to handle remote access to production servers.
- mhurron 11y agoThey're over at /r/sysadmin.
- tacticus 11y ago/r/sysadmin is more populated by the winadmins who would give up their gui only after death.
- nrser 11y agothere's a dude there asking how to pick an email address. i'm pretty sure it's serious. <http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/38ba26/professional_personal_email_when/> http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/38ba26/professiona...
- voidlogic 11y agoA while back when I was responsible for windows boxes they ran ssh and RDP, there were plenty of times when machines were un-RDP-able but I could still SSH in and fix the saddness.
- hockeybias 11y agoI disagree. Under Gates early on I felt the developer love.
- halo 11y ago>Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip No thankyou. I can certainly understand including SSH support, but I don't want what is pretty much the only remaining viable non-Unix platform to start bundling horribly dated and clunky Unix-like commands and bloated GNU tools.
- cactusface 11y agoregedit would like to have coffee with you.
- blazingfrog2 11y agoOr you could use the PowerShell command line. http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/03/16/use-powershell-to-edit-the-registry-on-remote-computers.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/03/1...
- cactusface 11y agoYou can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in PowerShell?
- wumbernang 11y agoCouldn't agree more. As a die hard Unix guy and ex Slashdot-esque zealot (colloquially a bit of a twat). Yet I'm knocking out PowerShell all the time now and dread having to log into the pile of CentOS kit I have lying around. It is arcane. Even after 15 years I spend most of my time in the manpages or working out another damn config format. Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST endpoint with the parsed data as JSON in PowerShell. I cant even use python now. I've been broken. It makes me cringe saying all this as well kind of like a racist making amends with his past. The only thing I still hate is windows update.
- halo 11y ago
- rsync 11y ago"Hmm. They can now have a path to obsolete cmd. As long as they ship a decent ssh client with the system, users will become accustomed to ssh-ing to their own box instead of using cmd." I'm not sure I understand what you mean here ... My OS X desktop/laptop (for instance) have ssh on them, but I almost never ssh to them ... I just open up a local terminal window. Genuinely curious as to why one would ssh to their windows system rather than just run cmd.exe ...
- stoic 11y agoIt is SSH versus RDP, not SSH versus cmd.exe. Not all of us who manage (partial) Windows environments run Windows or care to click around a whole bunch of times if we can just use the terminal we've already got open & focused.
- jfuhrman 11y agoThis feature is more useful on Windows Server.
- new_hackers 11y agoGenuinely curious as to why one would use cmd.exe instead of PowerShell?
- ptaipale 11y agoBecause cmd.exe, or command.com, has been around for over 30 years, and lots of people have learned it. PowerShell is nice but a couple of decades overdue.
- claudiusd 11y ago> Hmm. They can now have a path to obsolete cmd. As long as they ship a decent ssh client with the system, users will become accustomed to ssh-ing to their own box instead of using cmd. Baby steps! SSH is a transport protocol, not a shell. If you SSH to your own box, you're just going to get PowerShell.
- jameshart 11y agoSSH clients are also typically terminal emulators, though. The idea here would be to have an ssh client which acts as a better terminal than cmd.exe does. The effect of this isn't about whether you get access to a better shell, but instead about whether you have a better terminal with which to talk to that shell.
- TylerE 11y agoFYI: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandPrompt.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandP... Will happily run a cmd window, or other command you supply (e.g. I run a cygwin zsh)
- gnu8 11y agoThe definitive SSH client isn't though. PuTTY, SecureCRT and the like are terminal emulators with SSH built in, but those are not the standard. One of the big missing features in Windows is lack of SSH transport. Sure, its terminal emulator is adequate at best, but it does have one. The major news here is that it will finally be possible to remote into a Windows host the same way we remote to everything else.
- Alupis 11y agoNever thought I'd say this... but I can foresee a future release of Windows being touted as POSIX compliant.
- josteink 11y agoIt already was. In the NT days.
- ptaipale 11y agoYes, they even had a slogan "Windows NT is a better UNIX than UNIX". Which never rang really true, but NT had promise.
- cturner 11y agoCould you be mixing this up? There was a heavil-used phrase, "OS/2 is a better Windows than Windows" during the Windows 3.0 era, because the OS/2 Windows subsystem was far more stable than Microsoft's Windows (and also - as it happens - a good deal more stable than the rest of OS/2 also).
- ptaipale 11y agoI'm not making it up; if you google the phrase "better Unix than Unix" you'll find a number of references to these words. However, it probably wasn't a direct quote by Bill Gates, as was claimed. http://www.uniforum.org/publications/ufm/aug96/unix-nt.html http://www.uniforum.org/publications/ufm/aug96/unix-nt.html https://books.google.fi/books?id=g0CPF6MEFcUC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22better+unix+than+unix%22&source=bl&ots=YgM4HTqgUm&sig=os5bWlyAe0aBWmxi8KH5-XZ-j8o&hl=fi&sa=X&ei=vdpuVcf7BcOUsAG1uIHwDw&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22better%20unix%20than%20unix%22&f=false https://books.google.fi/books?id=g0CPF6MEFcUC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1...
- cturner 11y agoThanks. Bizarre.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoSupporting developers means making their lives easy by giving them streamlined systems and frameworks, not throwing a hodge-podge of of command line utilities at them or exposing them to the messy bazaar of the FOSS world. I'd say Microsoft has been been more pro-developer than most and I'm super glad that I chose to live primarily in their ecosystem because they make my life easy compared to the mess I have to put up with in Unix-land.
- MartinCron 11y agoI appreciate the courage of posting what seems like an unpopular opinion, but I can't agree with you. The messy bazaar of the FOSS world has been overlapping with the Windows ecosystem for some time, even high profile projects from Microsoft like ASP.NET MVC have been open source for years now.
- matthewmacleod 11y agoI would say that's a minority view at best. There are two worlds in desktop software development – the "open-source-unix-y" world, and the "Microsoft" world. The former has typically meant having a broad range of excellent tooling; it's certainly been a bit messy, but that's mostly because of the ease with which things have been able to change and develop. Even development in the Apple sphere has always involved the same basic tools. On the other hand, development using the Microsoft platform has traditionally been an entirely different process and toolset. It's cleaner, in the sense that there's less diversity and a greater focus on compatibility (to some extent). But the tradeoff there is that it's often been slow to keep up with developments in the rest of the industry, and did not allow users access to open, standard tooling that other developers had. That is changing now, and we'll start to see the best of the traditionally locked-away Microsoft platform make its way into open-source platforms, and vice versa. That's not a bad thing, but I think it's pretty foolish to consider their past stance as 'developer-friendly', especially considering the number of frameworks and toolkits they've pushed and abandoned over the past decade. Hopefully, that is changing.
- pjc50 11y agoThe dichotomy has long been "large number of single-purpose tools that can be combined" versus "single monolith that could theoretically be scripted but rarely is". The monolithic system doesn't have to worry about mismatches, seams and fragmentation, but is also brittle.
- WalterBright 11y ago> there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer company. That hasn't been my experience. Microsoft has always been supportive of my compiler company, even providing Microsoft tools to be bundled with it. In fact, a huge reason MSDOS was so enormously successful was the ease with which anyone could (and did) write and ship software for it. Microsoft was well aware of this and supported it.
- saulrh 11y agoThere's a slight difference between "pro-developer" and "pro-company-that-develops-things". Microsoft has always provided excellent corporate support. If you have an issue and you're paying lots of money, Microsoft will move one and zero to fix your problem. Early and recent Microsofts, though, have a feeling that middle Microsoft didn't where they're friendly directly to the people writing the code. Better documentation, better quality-of-life features (ssh, headless, Visual Studio), more listening to the community. I mean, ssh? A build specifically intended for the raspberry pi form factor?
- h43k3r 11y agoYesterday only I was talking with my friend about "Would Microsoft will ever support ssh?" and voila its done. I am a linux guy who did his intern in Microsoft. That was the first time I appreciated Powershell and from then I am in love with it. Its object oriented nature makes thing easy, fluid, understandable. I can never run linux command line with Google but with Powershell, its possible with the way it manages help pages.
- pbowyer 11y ago> Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. First, let's have a copy tool with delta-sync support. I can't believe I have to use a cygwin-based rsync to quickly update my backups throughout the day (currently: shut down Virtualbox dev VM, rsync changes, start VM). I understand the MS way to do it is DSFR, but for a single developer workstation that's overkill.