One of the (very few) things that I completely love about using a Mac for software development is the integrated command line which does a pretty good job of approximating a Unix environment. This is great for me, and supplements how I work nicely.
To get a similar environment under Windows has always been a great goal, but somewhat hindered by the completely shit that is cygwin. So, as I commented in my last entry, I have started using VirtualBox to provide a great scripting environment, but I’m still stuck in the mire of not having a decent terminal client to access the command line shell.
There are a number of alternatives, of which SecureCRT is probably the best (an awesome application that I’ve owned for many, many years) but it’s a commercial piece of software that many people may not feel the need to buy. PuTTY is pretty good, but it’s only a marginally better application than the standard Windows console application.
Frustration over the weekend finally got to the point of doing something about it, and I investigated a number of alternatives including Console2, Xshell, MinGW and finally settled on using MobaXterm (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/en/). Great application with a number of awesome features that I’ve not completely finished exploring yet. It comes as a free for personal use, with an upgrade to a professional version for $49 EURO. I’ll keep using it for a while to see if I want to upgrade, but I might do it just to support the work.
Hope that helps some people become more productive.
That's so stupid that it's not even wrong 