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Ubuntu on Windows

(blog.dustinkirkland.com)
2049 points bpierre | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.471s | source
1. icc97 ◴[] No.11393328[source]
I know what is being proposed is a whole lot more, but the GNU command line tools that come with msys git are pretty extensive.

The example commands from the article are all available with the git distribution:

> cp -a

> find | xargs | rename

> grep | xargs | sed

You can do all that - plus ssh (with ssh-agent) from the DOS prompt (you don't need PS, PuTTY or git bash).

There's vim too that comes with syntax highlighting, for which there's solarized dark/light colour palettes for the DOS prompt [1], as well as decent enough consolas fonts that you can use.

You can do an `ls *.exe` in the C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin directory to see the list of programs that are there.

Now that Windows 10 has done some 20 year late improvements to the underlying console window [2], you can properly resize the window and the text flows properly.

The only thing I miss are the `history` and `!` commands for which I wrote a hacky bat file implementation of [3].

Edit: Clink [4] appears to be a fully compatible GNU history (Readline) implementation.

Chocolatey is pretty awesome too.

[1]: https://github.com/neilpa/cmd-colors-solarized

[2]: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt427362.aspx

[3]: https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/dos-command-his...

[4]: http://mridgers.github.io/clink/

replies(1): >>11395222 #
2. imron ◴[] No.11395222[source]
I've been using Git Bash (installed with Mysys Git) as my Windows command line for years now.

It's not perfect, but I much prefer it over cygwin.