Developers, developers, developers
Yes, what else, I'm referring to the infamous Steve Ballmer going crazy on stage scene. Bruce Eckel recently wrote in a blog post:
He's right, developers are important. And if you only go to Microsoft conferences, it looks like all developers are using Windows. But if you go to any other developer conference, everyone is using Macs.
Which got me thinking, WTF is up with the Windows command prompt? If there's one thing developers need, it's a solid command line interface which lets them manipulate OS primitives with the minimum of fuss. So why do I find myself installing Cygwin and puttycyg on every Windows machine that I need to get some work done with? Maybe I'm just a *nix die-hard who's too stubborn to learn something new but it works great, for the most part (what's wrong is the subject of another rant altogether).
Some will probably say that PowerShell is meant to be the answer but I disagree. It may be nice for scripted rolling out of patches and performing other sysadmin-type tasks en masse but c'mon, who wants to use that as their shell? Even if you were willing to dig deeper and learn the arcane syntax, you're still stuck in the same old DOS box "terminal" that the regular cmd.exe runs in. Even trivial operations like resizing the window or copy & paste are a misson. A Google search for "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly" returns a similar rant about PowerShell as one of the top results so clearly I'm not the only one frustrated by it. It all sounds very good on paper what with the pipes on steroids and .NET integration but it somehow fails to provide a shell replacement.
Are all Windows developers hopelessly stuck somewhere deep inside the Visual Studio GUI? (The ones that haven't migrated to the Mac yet, anyway?)
August 28th, 2009 - 07:16
Agreed, the Windows console is a joke. Have a look at Console2, which puts a more usable interface on it. As for Cygwin, try MinTTY, which is a dedicated Cygwin terminal based on parts of PuTTY. Leaner and more xterm-compatible than PuTTYcyg.
August 28th, 2009 - 08:29
Thanks for the MinTTY tip, Andy! I didn’t know about it before and the fact that it’s also included in the Cygwin distribution means there’s one less thing to worry about installing separately. I’ve been playing with it this morning and it looks like I won’t be needing puttycyg anymore
See – some good things do come out of rants!