If people knew grep, sed, and awk, there wouldn’t have appeared many good and beautiful programs.

Let’s face it, after 9 years on linux exclusively, I feel helpless in windows. Navigation, search, editing, and processing files is very easy and natural in unix: you may know just few commands, and the way to build pipelines out of them.

Fortunately, I remembered that I used to utilize MSYS in the past. So I tried to install it this time. Surprisingly, it comes with famous pacman as a package manager. So finally I felt like home: zsh, tmux, mc and vim are available in their repository and practically work like in linux.

Consequences:

  • I can stay really productive now concentrating on product development
  • I removed bunch of beautiful, but useless programs like Far manager, console emulator, archiver etc
  • I can now easily switch between linux and windows environments for cross-platform development
  • I had to abandon QEMU KVM, because apparently VirtualBox handles MSYS’s mintty much better.

MSYS2 in Windows7