From: Hugh Sasse Date: 2006-10-27T19:47:48+09:00 Subject: Re: How do I tell when I'm on Cygwin? On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote: > On 10/26/06, Robert Dober wrote: > > These are all very nice and honerable tools but I go with the folks who, > > like me, feel that is too much pain to learn too many tools, I love bash, I > > need to learn zsh for professional reasons, and I have sooo many other > > interesting stuff I cannot even read about. > > I simply do not understand that. I *cannot* understand that. It I believe you are mistaken in this assertion: I think you can understand, that even within the set of programmers, people have different learning styles. They have different priorities that result from that. > essentially boils down to "I don't want to know anything about this > platform that I must use." I am equally comfortable in Unix and That's not my case. I'd like to be more fluent in Windows but there are so many irritations that it isn't worth the pain, for me. Concrete examples? Well, you talk about impedance mismatches. Almost all other OSs I have used use / as the dierctory separator. Windows uses \. That's at a more fundamental level of programming habit than knowing that C: becomes /cygdrive/c under cygwin. All modern programming languages that distinguish between double quoted strings and single quoted strings use the doubles for expansion of variables. Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl.... What does Windows do? The opposite. This means whenever I use windows commands from CMD they fail the first time. Yes, I will grant you that the command set in CMD is better than in Windows3. WindowsXP doesn't even provide an ANSI colo(u)r command window. How rubbish is that? Syntax highlighting (etc) is the norm now, but I can't use tools like glark effectively on windows without something like cygwin. This is clearly a step backwards from DOS! > [...] > > But maybe the *real* discussion is about Windows, I use Cygwin to *forget > > that Window even exists* it is a therapy for me. > > That's the problem, then. If you want to forget Windows even exists > when you're using Windows, why the HELL are you using Windows in the In my case, I work in an environment where Management expects people to use it, and they communicate with us using Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. Do I have any hope of convincing them that these are not open standards, so we are tied to the whims of one company, so we should avoid that? Staff get machines with windows on. Is it really worth the grief of using something else and getting it to inter-operate with these tools? And besides, there is a lot of software that only works for Windows, and quite a lot of that works sufficiently well to make it a usable system for work. So, I spend most of my time in a PuTTY window, using a Solaris system. > first place? If your workplace requires that you use Windows, then > install coLinux and be done with it. Otherwise, install Linux or I'll look into coLinux at some point. Thanks. > FreeBSD or something else on your machine and stop pretending you're > using Unix. > > If you can't stand working in the Windows cmd.exe, spend the money to > get TotalCommander or Directory Opus. I personally prefer TC on What money? Don't get me started on budgeting... That's another reason for using Cygwin, we don't have to get someone to agree to the budgeting for it. > Your quote ("The reasonable man adapts himself...") is somewhat apt. > However, you're not going to change Windows by being unreasonable on > Windows (e.g., expecting Unix behaviour to mesh well); others won't Cygwin does it sufficiently well to be very useful. Is it perfect? Well, is anything? Of course not. E.g: keyboard shortcuts for cut and paste? No. > change Linux by being unreasonable on Linux (e.g., running WINE). > Better to deal with things as they are if you must deal with an > operating system you do not prefer. Isn't that what cygwin does for people? It lets them deal with things as they are. I don't use cygwin for writing code for Windows, apart from Ruby apps. And Ruby, like Perl, has sufficient Unix heritage to make that more pleasant in cygwin, from my point of view. So, does all the above make your choice NOT to use it wrong? No. You use what works best for you. That won't be the same choice for everyone else, though. > > -austin > -- Hugh