Live data from Hacker News

Babun – A new Windows shell

babun.github.io

41–50 of 112 posts

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#41
post #15
post #4

Lost me at "based on Cygwin". Yes Cygwin brings some unix goodness, but it has enough warts that I avoid it.

Can you give some examples?

I almost got a 0 on a programming project for an intro to CS class because it compiled and ran perfectly fine on Windows, but segfaulted on Linux.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#43

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?

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.

You should try starting your arch partition in virtualbox, I've had success doing that before (you can still boot into it normally as well).

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#44
post #30

No PowerShell integration makes this useless to me unfortunately.

Everyone who would be satisfied by Cygwin is already using cygwin. so this will not help them. and people using CMD must use CMD for some reason, and even though that crowd would be please by just being able to maximize their windows, this does not offer any improvement for those people. sadly, i'm in the second group.

Have you looked at Console2?

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#45
post #12
post #2

I was actually expecting a new GUI shell for the recent windows versions. I used to run bb4win in the w2k times, but it doesn't look like win 7/8 have any popular alternative shells available. Does anyone know of those?

Blackbox is working on windows 8. If you head over to deviant art you can find some shots of working setups on the Blackbox group: http://blackboxdesktop.deviantart.com/

That's a very fragmented community, there seems to be zipfiles of random builds of dubious origin flying everywhere. Where's the "upstream" source?

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#46
post #12
post #2

I was actually expecting a new GUI shell for the recent windows versions. I used to run bb4win in the w2k times, but it doesn't look like win 7/8 have any popular alternative shells available. Does anyone know of those?

Blackbox is working on windows 8. If you head over to deviant art you can find some shots of working setups on the Blackbox group: http://blackboxdesktop.deviantart.com/

LiteStep seems to be active with development much easier to follow than BlackBox - https://github.com/lsdev/LiteStep

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ seems like it still uses cygwin1.dll (or whatever it's called these days). Am I missing something?

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#48
post #22

"on top of Cygwin"... So does it mean still no copy&paste?

Copy and paste work here.

Yes! Select the ctrl+shift+letter option in Keys, and you'll even have ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v working. That, and the console window auto adjusts to resized window makes for a great start for me. Not to mention the ctrl+scrollwheel or plus/minus for changing the font size. Kudos to the devs.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Because they prefer Windows. 2. Because their company has standardized on Windows desktops and/or hardware. 3. Because some people might actually believe and have good evidence that Windows is a more "developer friendly" operating system for their needs.

1 and 2 are perfectly legit reasons to use Windows. 3, though seems weird. If you're installing something like Babun to make your windows machine act more like a nix machine, it seems reasonable to assume that a nix box would be better for your development needs, and that you have some other reason for using windows (like #1 or #2).

Well, if you're developing for Windows, or developing for the web and need to test Internet Explorer, or if you're either doing UI design or dealing with other people's UI designs and need access to Photoshop or Illustrator, or if you're using Visual Studio at least some of the time, or if you're working with a MySQL database and want to use something like SQLyog... there's lots of tools on Windows that can be useful for developers, and someone can very reasonably conclude that Windows (through something like this) offers better access to nix tools than nix offers to Windows tools via Wine.

Re: Babun – A new Windows shell

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ seems like it still uses cygwin1.dll (or whatever it's called these days). Am I missing something?

Yes, you are missing the MSYS build listed on their download page. It does not use Cygwin.

MSYS/Mingw are native ports of the GNU software tools and friends.

Post reply on HN