Once upon a time I mentioned in passing that Windows stopped bothering me much when I stopped using it, and that the results of having to start again as an employee of a largely PC institution were as yet undetermined.
It’s starting to bother me again. I spent a couple of hours this morning (as I did yesterday afternoon, come to think of it) dredging through old files of my predecessor and trying to determine what I needed, what I could delete, and how to incorporate it into a system that works for me.
My brain said “terminal” about 25 times. And I can’t use a terminal! If I want a new folder over there, I have to click there (losing my place in Explorer in the process), right click in the explorer frame, choose New in the menu, track up to Folder, and then type the name. Then click-click my way back to the actual files I want to move into the new folder. Alternatively, I can make the new folder in a second Explorer window, reducing clicks to focus-shifting between windows. Now, there may be keyboard shortcuts for some of this (apple-shift-N, my brain prompts) but they aren’t at all obvious. I really miss manipulating files at the speed of typing.
Comments
No terminal?
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.
Re: No terminal?
What command line? Do you mean the old DOS thing? Because I looked for that and it availed me not.
Re: No terminal?
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?
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?
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.
cmd is total crap
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: cmd is total crap
I didn’t say cmd was good. I just said it was there. :P