If you’ve ever used the MS-DOS command prompt under Windows, you will have noticed that it is not very good. Fortunately, you can instead run the GNU Bourne-Again Shell, bash, on your Win32 system. (If you’ve used a GNU/Linux system, you’ve probably already used bash.) Some of the nice features of bash are:
Tab, and let bash do the rest)I’d suggest that you get the bash distributed with the Cygwin utilities package. The Cygwin distribution consists of all your favourite Unix utilities, ported to run on 32-bit Windows. Well worth the download.
If you decide to switch to bash, please don’t spoil the experience by running it in a Windows console! A far better option, in my opinion, is to use a good terminal emulator like rxvt. Rxvt is faster, resizes easier, has a customisable menu system, a decent scrollback, looks nicer, is much more configurable, and is also free. You can get a Win32 port of rxvt that doesn’t require an X-server here.
Here are some screenshots of bash running in Windows console and in rxvt.
So, how much faster is rxvt? I timed how long it took to cat a large text file to the terminal, both in rxvt and in the standard Windows console, and here are the results:
| Console | Time/s |
|---|---|
| Cygwin-compiled RXVT console | 5.0 |
| Microsoft Windows 98 console | 127.1 |
The test file consisted of 10,000 80-character lines. The times shown were averaged over five runs, with both consoles set to 80 × 25 characters with no scrollback. Both were run under the same screenmode (1280 × 1024 × 24 b/pixel). The tests were run on my 350 MHz Pentium-II PC under Windows 98.
* No, I’m not inciting violence against Microsoft products, but it’s not such a bad idea…
[an error occurred while processing this directive]