Bringing Bash's powerful command line editing to Microsoft Windows' cmd.exe

[ehosca]

Do yourself a favor, learn PowerShell if you have to work on Windows. http://technet.microsoft.com/library/bb978526.aspx

[Graphon]

While powershell is a valuable and interesting option, the problem with it is that it changes the basic metaphor.

For 40 years unix shells and their descendants and derivatives including cmd.exe have used files and text streams as the metaphor for interconnecting processes. Powershell changes that, and it means the output of one command goes to the input of another command as "objects".

This can be powerful, but it is also very disorienting. Which means it can be hard to learn to do even basic things in powershell, things that would take only a pipe or two and a couple unxutls programs in cmd.exe.

In cmd.exe, easy things are easy and hard things can be really hard. In powershell, hard things are hard (as opposed to "really hard") and easy things are hard.

[slowpoke]

Do yourself a favor and don't lock yourself even more into the Windows environment if you, for whatever reason, have to work with it.

[soldermont001]

Except you can't change your default shell to it, and expect your system to work. You also can't expect that it's installed by default.

[alttab]

Powershell is retarded. Microsoft uses it for their "web services" too which defeats the entire fucking point of it being a web service.

[projectileboy]

Is this different from Unix Utils? Every gig I've ever been on where I'm forced to use a Windows box, first thing I do is load the Unix Util exes into some directory and add it to the path. http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

[pudquick]

If you like unixutils, you might like GOW a bit more:

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki

Kept up to date, every .exe (once installed) is self-contained (no external .DLLs) and portable to just about any Windows box I've run into.

No Cygwin or MinGW installation required.

Bash is actually available in the list (albeit an older version) if you really wanted "bash on Windows"

[Graphon]

Yes, it's different. UnxUtls gives you grep, tar, tr, gzip, and etc. Clink appears to give you shell command completion and history completion.

They are complementary.

[malkia]

There is also busybox for Windows - https://github.com/pclouds/busybox-w32

[slu]

Looks sweet.

I currently have to use Windows at the customer I'm working for. I've installed Console which gives tabs and better copy-n-paste on Windows. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

I'm not sure if clink and Console will work together, but I'll have to try it.

[ot]

Console2 regularly crashes on my Windows 7, and it looks like it's not actively developed.

I'm giving ConEmu a try and it looks awesome!

http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Scott Hanselman wrote a blog post about it:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...

[daliusd]

I have tested and clink works with Console. Actually I don't see reason why it shouldn't work with Console. Maybe there might be shortcuts collisions but I have not met yet any.

[rbn]

I use console too and it's awesome. I love the tabs and the transparency feature.

[gouranga]

I've switched to powershell ISE on windows (shipped with it) rather than cmd hosted powershell. Does the job!

[omaranto]

Is it worth installing .NET 3.5 to run the ISE? I use Powershell but only have .NET 4 which runs it just fine. I'm a little surprised that ISE requires 3.5.

[noveltyaccount]

Have you tried the ISE on Win8 yet? It gets some nice upgrades around intellisense.

[alanbyrne]

What's wrong with Powershell?

[gecko]

I love PowerShell dearly, and I miss it on Unix systems, but what this is trying to fix, and what still stinks at the moment, is the command-line editing situation in Console, which has nothing to do with PowerShell v. Bash v. cmd.exe.

[7D8]

as a .NET developer who sits in both Linux and Microsoft worlds, but primarily in Microsoft technologies, I must say that PowerShell is a very useful and amazing addition to Windows. I did have to learn it, but once I did, I love it.

[pygy_]

Yet another tool to learn.

It is definitely worth it for some people, but time is a limited resource, and others will benefit from this kind of project.

[est]

starts too slow.

[38leinad]

just use cygwin

[ot]

I feel like cygwin manages to combine the worst of UNIX and the worst of Windows. And the commands that use the cygwin runtime are noticeably slower than the native counterparts.

Also, AFAIK there is no 64bit version yet, which for me is a dealbreaker (I often work with files larger than 2GB).

[malkia]

Or just use Far Manager - http://www.farmanager.com - it's Midnight Commander, Norton Commander type of program.

[shortlived]

I've watched numerous Russian colleagues use it and it does not look appealing. These same colleagues do not seem to understand the power of a real *nix shell. You end up doing less typing if you really know your shell and how to pipe etc.

[Bjartr]

Why use this over a cross-compiled version of Bash?