This is not an alternative to Cygwin, and shouldn't be called such.
Cygwin isn't a collection of binaries; that's a distribution. But the idea is to emulate UNIX, including fork(), etc., allowing you to easily recompile for Windows.
Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#82Cygwin is not perfect, but he's the thing that I prefer over other options. It's unix emulator layer, and as such tries it's best to emulate fork() - which the other alternatives does not even think to put in. VM is not a real alternative, as there is actually more work to be done to plumb source A with tools B from the VM. I don't use cygwin from bash, but rather start it directly from the FAR manager (console based…
Regarding symlinks on Windows: http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vista-symlinks-revisited/ And an open source (MIT) binary-compatible implementation of ln for Windows Vista+ using native WIN32 APIs: http://neosmart.net/blog/2011/open-source-100-compatible-ln-... disclosure: my site
Thanks a lot! SysInternals, NirSoft tools and anything that I can find for Windows is very very much appreciated. (At home I'm sticking to OSX and Ubuntu, but at work the situation is rather different - I'm often finding myself arguing with myself - at home I prefer gnome/gtk, at work I better stick to Windows.Forms, hehehe).
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#83A somewhat heavier version of cygwin, in which everything will work the way it's supposed to: http://www.centos.org I kid, I kid...
But then you can't run a decent Window Manager like Windows 7.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#84Oh, heretics! How dare they leave ed out of the list [1]? [1] https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list
ED IS THE STANDARD UNIX EDITOR! IT MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE SKY BLUE AND THE GRASS GREEN!
I DON'T NEED TO SEE THE STATE OF THE FILE! I KNOW THE STATE OF THE FILE! I JUST NEED YOU TO CHANGE THE FILE.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#85Has anyone used this to run Ruby on Rails? If so, I might want to recommend it in the next edition of the Rails Tutorial.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then there's always colinux - where you can have both, at the same time, without virtualization.
I was surprised that colinux wasn't more popular than it is. I remember thinking it was a pretty good idea when it was announced.
It has been on and off in its quality.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#87I understand why someone wouldn't like to use cygwin, but why new project? MSYS/mingw-get are active projects that provide a good base to build upon. Why not helping improve it? Unix tools on Windows is niche enough so that choice only leads to fragmentation, not competition.
This is exactly what I also thought when I read the headline. And this becomes even more strange given that they are almost certainly building upon using MinGW.
I have used MinGW, and MinGW is terribly slow comparing to Gow. Do a simple "ls" you will feel the difference. Not to mention bash.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#88How does this compare to the MinGW/MSYS ( http://mingw.org ) project?
I was about to ask the same question. MinGW is already the lightweight alternative to Cygwin, and has largely taken over for the task of compiling unixy things on Windows. The major difference between MinGW and Cygwin is MinGW tries to use native Microsoft libs by dummy wrapping them (like, MS's libc is often compatible with POSIX standard stuff, the POSIX version merely starts with _ frequently, MinGW uses this fact…
The biggest difference to me is: Gow is amazingly FAST!
I have used MinGW and it is extremly slow, I need to always remind myself to use dir instead of ls, otherwise it's a few seconds' wait.
However, I do not think Gow is able to compile. (I did not really look into the documentation as github is blocked in my office.)
Another difference is MinGW appears to provide more up-to-date binary. e.g. bash in MinGW is 3.1 and in Gow is 2.03. And vim in Gow is 6.3 only.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#89What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?
I work at a company that currently provides a 32bit version of Windows 7 (the reasons are somewhat unclear.) But the bottom line is that we have the 3gb max addressable memory problem. When I have eclipse, outlook, chrome, various other dev tools and whatnot open, I'm often near the limit, and adding VMWare player or whatnot would probably be too much. So that's one reason... Plus, I find switching back and forth bet…
Most folks use Putty to avoid the strange switching. Then its like a better command window.
Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then there's always colinux - where you can have both, at the same time, without virtualization.
Colinux doesn't run in 64 bit Windows, unfortunately.
There is someone paying to do this port right now: https://www.odesk.com/jobs/Port-linux-bit_~~2416926dd8d9a963...
In my last job, I used colinux with Windows 7 and it was a match made in heaven. But when I moved, I had to choose the next best thing, which is Mac OS X, because of lack of support for 64-bit windows.