Comments on "Winclose" - Faerye Net

Re: cmd is total crap

2003-12-05T19:56:04+00:00

I didn’t say cmd was good. I just said it was there. :P

cmd is total crap

2003-12-05T16:37:05+00:00

cmd is total crap, as shells go. The command history is just weird, the tab-completion (after you turn it on) leaves much to be desired. It has very few useful programming constructs (it’s amazing how often I use for loops in bash), and the syntax for them is poorly thought out. cmd seems to lack even the basic job control constructs that Unix shells have had for decades.

As far as terminals go, again, cmd behaves like something a drunken VB programmer wrote over the weekend. Windows lacks anything resembling termcap/info; the windows console is dealt with in a very different way, so you really can’t use it like a terminal. The scroll buffer is totally braindead. If I want a 3000 line history buffer, I get a scroll bar that scrolls through 3000 lines, even if I just started the terminal. Resizing the terminal is really not an option; most apps can’t cope (plus you have to use the properties dialog, no corner dragging for you). The way that the terminal deals with text copy and paste is pretty obscure, not to mention the fact that selecting something in the terminal will cause whatever process is writing to it to block until the selection is cleared.

Cygwin is OK; at least you get bash and such. But still, the underlying OS really isn’t supportive of a CLI.

Re: No terminal?

2003-12-05T16:21:05+00:00

You really ought to give Cygwin a look. While I use Windows as my primary OS, I prefer a Unix command line, and Cygwin gives me the best of both worlds. It’s not perfect, but it makes things less painful.

Re: No terminal?

2003-12-05T16:01:02+00:00

Dood, that so doesn’t have the same icon it did in NT 4 :p

Thanks—that will be helpful. It doesn’t mean I like Windows though.

Re: No terminal?

2003-12-05T14:46:37+00:00

You can get a DOS command prompt one of two ways. The easiest is to click Start->Run (or press Windows Key + R) and type “cmd”. Or you can click on the shortcut at Start->All Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt.

Re: No terminal?

2003-12-05T14:44:17+00:00

What command line? Do you mean the old DOS thing? Because I looked for that and it availed me not.

No terminal?

2003-12-05T14:15:23+00:00

If it’s a command line you want, Windows has one. You can even tweak a registry setting to turn on tab completion. If it’s a Linux-style command line you want, you can get that via Cygwin.