The Lair

I go to great (some would say obsessive) lengths to duplicate a Unix command line experience on Windows. While the reasons are probably more complex than saying “I like Windows” or “I don’t like Linux”; it’s not ideology that prompts me to use Windows. It’s partly battery life (usually better with Windows than Linux, by as much as 15% or so on my old Acer), it’s partly software compatibility, it’s partly inertia (read: laziness) on my part.

Recently, I was asked why I liked command line and console based apps so much. This was after I moved from mIRC to the wonderfully configurable irssi and continually raved about it to the luckless chickenbutt. The most readily found reason to move is probably to reduce wear and tear on my fingers, wrists and elbows. I find constantly moving my hand from the keyboard to the mouse is downright inconvenient. So much so that after a few hours of the click frenzy that is Warcraft (for example) my right hand actually cramps over the mouse. Yeah, I should probably cut down on my play and/or not micro quite so much - but I also have a stated goal of reaching 200 APM in a standard ladder game (I hover around the 90-120 mark right now) so less clicking isn’t really going to help me achieve that. But as a rule, the less I have to grab the pointing device *cough*, the more comfortable I am.

Console apps are almost completely reliant on keyboard actions (in the form of shortcuts and mnemonic keys) so my hands never really have to leave the keyboard. Most of my frequently used apps are also heavily keyboard oriented - with lots of shortcuts and accelerators available. For everything else - I maintain a frequently updated copy of GnuWin32 - the Gnu tools for Windows.

There are a few other tool kits which provide similar functions - most notably Cygwin. Cygwin is a essentially a dynamically loadable library (dll) which tries to offer all of the functionality that a standard Unix system would offer. Every application which runs on Unix just needs to know where the Cygwin functions are located and they’ll automatically run on Windows as well. Sounds simple? Well, it is. Except that Cygwin is an emulator and that means that things can get rather slow. Not that this is such an important consideration in the age of 3+ GHz machines, but from a neatness point of view, Cygwin dependent tools require a nasty cygwin.dll be present to function at all. GnuWin32, on the other hand, use exactly what Windows has to offer - no emulation dll is required. They are, in other words, native implementations of the Gnu tools on the Windows platform.

So, browsing the GnuWin32 binaries directory yesterday afternoon; I found an oddly named executable. “[.exe“. It’s not often that you see an executable file named after a left square bracket but that’s exactly what I found here. And even worse, no right square bracket dot exe to keep it company?! Obviously, I punched in [ on the cmd prompt and waited to see what the message would be - …

[: missing ‘]’

Eh?

Wait, how about the standard Gnu syntax for help… [ --help.

Oooh. It’s actually GnuWin32’s implementation of conditionals. Nifty. Having [ .exe available allows anyone to write little shell scripts using the file test operators on Windows.