Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
I understand why someone wouldn't like to use cygwin, but why new project?
MSYS/mingw-get are active projects that provide a good base to build upon. Why not helping improve it? Unix tools on Windows is niche enough so that choice only leads to fragmentation, not competition.
Cygwin is not perfect, but he's the thing that I prefer over other options.
It's unix emulator layer, and as such tries it's best to emulate fork() - which the other alternatives does not even think to put in.
VM is not a real alternative, as there is actually more work to be done to plumb source A with tools B from the VM.
I don't use cygwin from bash, but rather start it directly from the FAR manager (console based Norton Commander/Midnight Commander application for Windows). It's very useful, as a lot of commands just work.
Then there are others, which are some kind of symlink (one of the downsides of cygwin for me), but that's understandable. Symlinks as they are on linux are just starting to appear on Windows Vista and 7 (and I'm not even sure how compatible they are).
So for such cases, sh -c would work. For example checking out latest SDL using cygwin, but from the command-prompt:
c:\p\sdl> sh -c "hg pull -u"
And then other stuff works even better:
c:\p\libzmq> git pull -u c:\p\libzmq> sh -c "gitk --all"
I find it strange that no one is mentioning UWIN[1], started by David Korn about the same time and with the same goals as Cygwin.
I used to use it. I liked the fact that it used the host compiler instead of gcc, plus I preferred the non-GNU tools.
Now I'm using Inferno, it works much better. It's not Unix, it's Plan9, but I view that as a plus. Of course cygwin can install all kinds of Unixy tools, like gcc, openssh, xterm and whatnot. Inferno doesn't come with anything, but I don't need anything except the basic Plan9 tools.
[1] http://www2.research.att.com/~gsf/download/uwin/uwin.html
How does this compare to the MinGW/MSYS (http://mingw.org) project?
Oh, heretics! How dare they leave ed out of the list [1]?
We really need to port Homebrew to Windows so that projects like this can be the base, but people can pull in packages on top of it, like a lightweight Cygwin but more Windows'y.
Well for a far more light weight solution there's GnuWin32 and GetGnuWin32 (which installs GnuWin32), both available via an easy Internet search. They both run from the command prompt and you don't need any other environment for them.
This is not an alternative to Cygwin, and shouldn't be called such.
Cygwin isn't a collection of binaries; that's a distribution. But the idea is to emulate UNIX, including fork(), etc., allowing you to easily recompile for Windows.
Would be good to have a standard ssh client similar to the ones in linux and other unixes. I use Cygwin mainly for that. I do not want to do putty -ssh ... and I want to copy my keys and other config in ~/.ssh. Like that I can "standardize" the way I setup my accounts on cygwin and linux. Without that it is kind of a big hassle
Is there an SSH server for Windows that will work with this?
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No support for Pipes. :(
The real point:
1) if you want to program in "gnu", run unx, and if you want Windows as your host OS, run virtualization; (yes, you need 8G, yes, you should have an SSD, if you don't, buy a new laptop for $700 and run linux native)
2) if you want a better command line, There's lighter weight ways like http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm ... and a set of binaries I found 5 years ago that seem to have vanished, works OK for me.
Has anyone used this to run Ruby on Rails? If so, I might want to recommend it in the next edition of the Rails Tutorial.
A smtp client (e.g. something like msmtp or ssmtp) so scripts can send email easily would be a nice addition.
What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?
another interesting older project along the same lines is gnuwin32 [http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/]
No awk? I'm outta here.
I DEMAND SUBVERSION!
A somewhat heavier version of cygwin, in which everything will work the way it's supposed to: http://www.centos.org
I kid, I kid...