Patiently I waited, and you know what they say “good things come to those who wait”. When I first heard about the release of Bash on Windows (which is run via the Windows Subsystem for Linux, here is a great overview), I was so excited that you’d think I had nothing else going for me in my life (for the record, I do… I’m just easily excited by shiny things).
Like many, I began my programming years on UNIX, and spent over 10 years primarily working in a command line even while living out the “experience” that was Visual C++ with MFC (I originally said “horror” but ok it wasn’t all that bad – it’s just that the .NET Framework with Visual C# solved so many of the pain points from it that looking back now it seems like it may have been hell!). Anyway, my point is that I used to live in the command line, I love the power of it, love the scripting languages, and let’s be honest, using the command line makes us feel smarter! Come on, it’s true. I’ve tried to recreate the experience since moving to pretty much full-time Windows-based web development using tools like Cygwin, the Git Bash, and a lovely selection of “UNIX-commands for DOS” that I’ve been carting around for years (which seem to have stopped working in Windows 10, anyway), but it’s not the same.