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TCSH on Windows XP?

Posted by Cliff on from the shells-on-win32 dept.

An unfortunete XP user... asks: "I find myself having to use a Windows XP Pro machine at work, but I want to convience of tcsh... command.com just doesn't cut it for what I am doing. Has anyone ported a *NIX shell (csh, tcsh, or even sh) to Windows XP Pro?" How well does Cygwin handle the Windows XP environment?

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Cygwin or 4NT? by Chelloveck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Cygwin's bash runs passably well. However, I can't really recommend cygwin due to the basic conflicts between Unix and Windows conventions. Most Unixes have case-sensitive filenames, for instance, but Windows doesn't. And there's no clean mapping of Unix permissions to NTFS ACLs. Cygwin's nice, and I keep it around for a few things, but personally I get frustrated when I run up against things that are almost but not quite like they should be.

    On the other hand, if you're just looking for a decent command shell for Windows, you can't do much better than 4NT from JP Software. 4NT is compatible with 'cmd.exe', yet adds a whole bunch of features reminiscent of a good Unix shell. I've been a big fan of 4DOS/4NT for quite a few years.

    Oh, and don't forget to download Perl, Python and/or Tcl from ActiveState.

    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  2. Google for "zsh win32" by costas · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There is a native Zsh port for win32 that works very nicely (case insensitivity, path translation, etc) and doesn't require Cygwin. Zsh itself is more powerful than tcsh and although it's a sh-like shell (in the family of ksh and bash) it has lots of c/tcsh-like feature to help ease the transition.