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Babun – A new Windows shell

babun.github.io

31–40 of 112 posts

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#33
While part of me still wants to tell would-be hackers to just switch to OS X or Linux, I've realized recently that a lot of hackers are bound to Windows because they use various software that only works on Windows, like games, or because of social limitations.

I have no clue how good Babun is, but I have no clue how I ever got anything done on Windows without a Unix shell. Cygwin is not out-of-the-box enough, and the package manager is buggy. If Babun really works, I think it will matter a lot.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#34
post #5
post #3

A more mainstream alternative is cmder: https://bliker.github.io/cmder/

That looks like mostly a skin for conemu, no? I've desperately wanted to like conemu, but every time I use it something ends up broken in weird ways (hung tabs, garbled output).

I agree. I really want to like it, but moving through history with the arrow keys can often crash that tab.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#35
post #33

While part of me still wants to tell would-be hackers to just switch to OS X or Linux, I've realized recently that a lot of hackers are bound to Windows because they use various software that only works on Windows, like games, or because of social limitations. I have no clue how good Babun is, but I have no clue how I ever got anything done on Windows without a Unix shell. Cygwin is not out-of-the-box enough, and the…

I'm a self-taught programmer. I've basically been using linux 99% of the time for the past five years, and just have a partition that runs windows if I need it. Funnily enough, the first real programming gig I landed is a full time job doing full stack .NET development, so now it's sort of flipped around. I do miss the command line. I'll have to check this out. I've been looking for a good windows shell replacement.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#36
post #33

While part of me still wants to tell would-be hackers to just switch to OS X or Linux, I've realized recently that a lot of hackers are bound to Windows because they use various software that only works on Windows, like games, or because of social limitations. I have no clue how good Babun is, but I have no clue how I ever got anything done on Windows without a Unix shell. Cygwin is not out-of-the-box enough, and the…

I'm a self-taught programmer. I've basically been using linux 99% of the time for the past five years, and just have a partition that runs windows if I need it. Funnily enough, the first real programming gig I landed is a full time job doing full stack .NET development, so now it's sort of flipped around. I do miss the command line. I'll have to check this out. I've been looking for a good windows shell replacement.

The other thing worth looking at is the MinGW project. It's pretty easy to get started with the mingw-get package manager (there's an installer you can find here: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started).

Once you have mintty running as your terminal emulator, and a decent shell like bash, life gets a whole lot easier.

The upside is that it's fully native without Cygwin's compatibility layer. The downside is that it won't have as many ported utilities (and probably not as easy to get started with as something like Babun).

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#37

I don't mean to sound like a prick, I'm just genuinely curious as to why someone would use windows for some CLI work. Are you using some software that isn't available on more developer-friendly operating systems?

Yes, compatibility with existing software is a big part of it. Unless you're exclusively developing for _nix environments you'll have to use Windows at some point. Also, I think Windows has (or had, depending on preference) a great GUI and a dismal CLI, while _nix is mostly the other way around.

OS X has both actually.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My situation is I have a Windows machine I game on and don't like rebooting all the time to get into my arch partition. It'd be nice to have a good shell to do some dev work on if I wanted to fix something really quick without rebooting. Right now I just boot up a vm and work on that. Shells I've used in the past (ConEmu, Console 2, Cmder) have all been good, but not good enough.

I know from personal experience that Steam works slightly better on windows than linux, so I see your point there.

Never mind the plethora of games which are Windows only.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, compatibility with existing software is a big part of it. Unless you're exclusively developing for _nix environments you'll have to use Windows at some point. Also, I think Windows has (or had, depending on preference) a great GUI and a dismal CLI, while _nix is mostly the other way around.

OS X has both actually.

Apple makes it hard to run OS X on anything but Apple hardware. For anyone that doesn't want to be bound to Apple hardware, this is not really even a real option.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#40
I've been using Cmder(http://bliker.github.io/cmder/) for quite some time when I'm on Windows, normally I just develop on Vagrant or Nitrous using Nitrous Desktop, so when I develop I'm always using an UNIX terminal, Cmder allowed me to do so on Windows, it depends on Console2 and it's quite nice, but oh-my-zsh is actually way more awesome, if this works nicely I'll consider switching. Babun seems to be much more serious than Cmder though, the fact that you can update it using 'babun update' and you can create plugins and such makes it so much potent.
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