Comment by pjungwir
8 years ago
When I have to work on a Windows machine the first thing I install is git: https://git-scm.com/downloads
It comes with bash and all the standard tools (including ssh IIRC), so I can work on a real command line. Especially as a vi user, I'm right at home.
I find this a lot easier to manage than Cygwin: a lighter install, no packages to select, and smoother integration.
These days you go to the Microsoft App store and download Ubuntu. It loads up actual bash and comes with everything you'd expect. (ssh being just one of the things). The terminal emulation is improving (there are still a couple of glitches) but pretty much all of my daily tools work exactly correctly.
For me, this is a huge thing.
When I bought my first Mac, back in the days of MacOS 10.2, I did so because of the BSD system underneath. Having a Unix system, whether its GNU or BSD, gives me access to tools that I'm familiar with and sometimes prefer to their GUI counterparts (e.g., scp/sftp vs FileZilla).
Now that Windows has this, switching back is something that I'm giving serious consideration to.
"Now that Windows has this, switching back is something that I'm giving serious consideration to."
It's not clear to me that Windows has this ...
I, like you, adopted the MacOS ecosystem because it was UNIX underneath ... but there's a big difference between underneath and alongside.
Although it is not commonly done, you can control and interact with your OSX system with UNIX commands ... there's one single filesystem namespace and you can interact with it from the command prompt as well as kill GUI apps or set preferences or ifconfig, etc.
It's my understanding that the Ubuntu subsystem in recent windows is sort of a parallel environment ... but is not meant to control the system directly or as an alternate path of interaction with Windows, correct ?
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I've been using WSL + wsltty [1] + Xming [2] for months and didn't encounter major issues. wsltty also added support to the Microsoft Store version recently.
For Xming, simply set DISPLAY in shell and local GUI programs just work, as well as SSH X forwarding.
[1] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
(EDIT: typo)
I tried this, but I found that my Ubuntu subsystem could not access my wifi connection at all, no matter what I tried. I remember reading Microsoft forums where developers from Microsoft acknowledged they were working through the issue. It still hadn't been resolved the last time I checked.
I'm on a Dell XPS 15 9560 if that matters.
> I'm on a Dell XPS 15 9560 if that matters.
It does as I've had no issues personally on as self-built desktop, an ASUS laptop, a MacBook running Bootcamp, and now a Surface Laptop.
Is there any advantages over using Ubuntu itself directly?
Well not if you aren't using other parts of Windows :-) but if you are constrained to using Windows for other reasons then the advantage is you get all the tools with a much lighter weight system than say running a virtual machine.
There are also some systems where kernel support for the devices is lagging, either because they are proprietary and poorly documented or because they have insufficient market penetration to get someone interested in writing good driver support. For example support for the pen on the Surface Pro 4 line is really horrible (IMHO) on Linux.
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The big advantage is that it runs within Windows, so you can use your Windows and Linux tools at the same time. It's also not done as a virtual machine, so the Ubuntu running on Windows can access and manipulate files on your Windows system very easily.
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That you can keep using Windows seamlessly?
I haven't done this yet, thanks for the reminder! I've been curious to try it as I've gone through probably every other bash emulator on Windows and not been overly satisfied.
I would love to hear how it works or doesn't work for you! I have shown it to lots of folks and probably a quarter have some aspect that keeps it from being perfect (generally a terminal issue or the lack of a Microsoft provided X server. For the latter I use xwin32 [1] which works fine but may not be accelerated if your display controller isn't supported.)
[1] https://www.starnet.com/xwin32/
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That's all fine and dandy until you want to develop Windows applications using Ubuntu on Windows.
There's still a place for windows native tools.
I install OpenSUSE Command line from the Windows Store.
Have you looked at Mobaxterm at all? I have the same issues, and accidentally discovered this a few years ago, and haven't looked back. Lightweight Cygwin install, own package manager, EXTREMELY usable. The free version is plenty good, but even the paid for version is 'only' $80.
I second this recommendation. It’s a really great tool; I really like the combined SSH and FTP integration so I can browse and edit files with my favorite text editor on the machine I’m ssh’ed into really efficiently while also running commands at the same time.
Another "me too!" for MobaXterm. Sessions in tabs, easy file transfer, built-in and automatic X forwarding.
I like PuTTY, and have used it a lot, but MobaXterm has been great.
Also love MobaXterm
I wish Cygwin performed better on Windows, git operations on Linux take minutes on Windows because it has to spin up the whole cygwin environment. This kind of still makes me want to use Linux, but MobaXTerm makes my Windows desktop very usable for administration.
Neat. I wasn't aware Git client had this much feature. On Windows 10 I have "Bash on Windows", but on older systems (such as Windows 7), Git client would do the trick.
MobaXterm is nice, but I don't like how heavy it is...
You should try WSL with cmder [1], a lightweight windows terminal that feels great and is heavily customizable. It’s the iTerm2 of Windows IMO.
[1] http://cmder.net/
+1 for CMDER, I recommend also following this guide [1] to easily launch linux subsystem for windows on cmder.
[1] https://gingter.org/2016/11/16/running-windows-10-ubuntu-bas...
Isn't it just ConEmu[1] bundled with some other utility?
[1] https://conemu.github.io/
WSL has exited beta on the mainline release. You can now install Ubuntu/Suse from the windows store. Look up the processes to extract data from your current wall, unintall the legacy edition and get the new addition. It's not clear yet how the legacy version will be impacted it may be easier to migrate sooner rather than later
or just install msys2. Works just as well imo, and can more easily integrate other packages as well.
It felt like x-mas when I discovered msys. The package management blew my mind. Getting a qt kit set up took about 1 minute.
Great wiki about set up and use here: https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki
Msys uses Arch Linux's package manager of all things
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MSYS2 is highly underated, it works perfectly and I cannot work without it now.
So it's basically a much-improved MinGW or binutils package, is that the idea?
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Yes! OOTB package mgmt...
The problem with gitbash is its way slower.
Plus, the real reason you get Putty or SecureCRT if you’re lucky, is because they are actually terminal emulators and not a DOS shell.
Sorry I don’t find Mona compelling at all.
Yeah, but doesn't Putty force you to use it's goofball ssh keys? With git bash you can use regular ssh keys. And, you can generate them the way you're used to (assuming you already use Linux). Idk, I think git bash works just fine in most cases.
It does. But it also comes with a utility that will generate keys, and/or convert regular SSH keys to the format Putty uses.
Wow. Way slower? Git bash is just as fast for me. And MUCH more convenient.
you can install the tools into your global path so that you can use git's openssh from powershell.
I really miss ‘git bash here’ from File Explorer when I’m on my macbook. Why it doesn’t have open terminal here/open iterm here I don’t know. I used to have an AppleScript thing to do it for iterm 2 but it got broke and now all I can find is a button in the finder window.. but it really should be built in.
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do, but if you leave the terminal icon in your Dock, dragging any folder from Finder onto it will launch terminal in that directory. Any good?
Nice, works with iTerm2 too - thanks :) I have an iTerm button in Finder which opens it in the current folder, so it's okay - but Windows has right click > open powershell here, and if you have git bash then it has right click > open git bash here - which feels more natural to me. I think the Linux desktops I've used all had right click > shell too.
Instead of ranting, perhaps post your broken AppleScript so we can help you fix that. It really ought to be < 10 lines of AppleScript.
This is what I do too.
I used to use Cygwin but it became a pain to manage the packages and it couldn't update it's own setup.exe last I checked.
I recently tried out WSL and I still run into problems with the file system. My home directory is in a new place which is kind of annoying. And cloning a repo with Git changed all the line endings. autocrlf didn't do anything for me either.
Back to good ol' git.exe
Git Bash is based on msys/mingw which have been around a while. I think both mingw and cygwin will both be deprecated in favor Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Highly unlikely. You'd only deprecate them if they serve the exact same purpose, but they don't. Many users will switch, but not those who want a posix runtime environment for a win32 executable that can run on machines that don't have WSL installed (cygwin, and the fork msys2 which git-bash is based on); or to use the gcc compilers to target win32 executables that use the windows native (non-posix) runtime - mingw. Do you know that you can use gcc to build windows executables and dlls from Linux, Mac, or WSL? That's mingw and it's not going away.
I have bash scripts within cygwin that control Windows firewall via netsh interface.
I still can't run those command under Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Wouldn't that be much easier to do with PowerShell? I haven't ever attempted, but I'm assuming...
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