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From: "Noel L Yap" <yap_noel AT jpmorgan DOT com>
To: Markus DOT Mauhart AT chello DOT at
cc: Cygwin AT Cygwin DOT Com
Message-ID: <852569F2.0073F7EB.00@nyc-ntgw-n01.ny.jpmorgan.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 16:06:42 -0500
Subject: Re: (OT) Newbie request for Info
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Warning, rantings of a tired, bored individual below:


Markus DOT Mauhart AT chello DOT at on 2001.02.13 15:04:48
>1st I have no working shell (only 25 lines, no cut&past, no easy to
>use line buffer like with NT cmd.exe, the keyboard behaves very unexpected
>(home, end, esc, ctrl-left/right, F7..))

CygWin provides this.  I use rxvt for an xterm and run bash as my shell.  I
haven't configured the home, end, ... keys to Windows-like behaviour mostly 'cos
I know equivalent Ctrl keys that have the same functionality (although I'd
appreciate if someone showed me how to configure these keys).

>2nd I have no working text editor & text browser like borlands or MS's
>programming IDE

I use vim and/or emacs as my editors.  vim is great 'cos it's extremely
light-weight -- you'll have to get used to the commands, though.  Emacs provides
as much functionality as you may ever want out of it since it's fully
configurable through elisp.

>3rd there simply exist no other file manager comparable with the one an only
>NT winfile.exe (dont mix it with the w95/98 version which is crippleware)
>which is lightning fast, fully keyboard controllable and allows to easily
>browse 2 or 3 directories simultaneously or to switch between many other
>directories (given that one knows how to use MDI applications) and is
>tightly integrated with the shell (alt-f r cmd enter .. less than 1 s).

There are file managers out there but I think most Unix people tend to like the
command line better (I'm one of them).  I'll use Windows Explorer now and then
for simple stuff.

>4th I have no fast and lean www browser which I need for the documentation
>from the web (cygwin & all gnu tools, ..) (IE55 easily can be configured to
>the absolutely minimum GUI, you need not be an expert for that, simply
>open its options dialog and do it)

Although I haven't used it on CygWin, I've used Lynx and it's so light-weight,
it uses a text-based GUI.  I've also used Netscape on Sun.  On a PC, I use
Netscape or IE, depending.

>5th I have no consistent and rich keyboard interface for all applications
>like with windows, where typically all commands are available through
>menues and the menue entries have their shortcuts which are displayed in
>the menue. E.g to minimize a console window or any other window the sequence
>'alt-space n' works today, it worked with win31, and it will work in
>5 years on windows 7.0.

Like I said before, Unix people tend to like command lines.  One reason is that
command lines are much more flexible than menu items.  For example, it took
Windows years to provide "find . -name "*" -print | xargs grep "some-text"
through their GUI.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's still impossible
to do something like:
find . -type f -print | while read f
do
    mv $f $f~
    sed 's/before/after/g' $f~ >$f
    rm $f~
done

to do a global search and replace on a bunch of files.  What about more
complicated command lines?

>6th hence for each real task I have to transfer the files and me to/from
>my (NT) workstation.

>Now there are uncountable advantages of a unix workstation and its toolset too
>as you know. But for someone coming from the windows environment the 1st step
to
>learn about and use some of them IMO now is cygwin, thanks to your and your
>friends efforts during the last years.
>
>Back to what caused me to write this email: I am surprised that you havnt
>realized (or dont mind) the fact that cygwin has a great potential to be
>the trojan horse of unix & gnu inside the windows world.

This is a good point, but read on.

>When cygwin additionally would come with easy to use and powerfull standard
>applications (mail reader, personal mail server & firewall, editor,
filemanager;
>easy means controllable through consistent menu's shortcuts, help menue -> open
doc
>in browser, ..), it would be only a small step to use the same applications
>under unix/linux and to forget the windows workstation.

Again, Unix people tend to like command lines (some Unix people don't even have
a window manager so they're forced to use command lines and text-based GUI's).
Windows people tend to assume that a window manager is just part of an operating
system.

So, if you really want to learn the Unix way of doing things, get used to typing
and using man (man man for more info :).  The Trojan Horse you mention above is
extremely ineffective since if CygWin added these neat and bloaty gadgets, it
would no longer be Unix on Windows and hence would defeat its own purpose.

Noel


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