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Monday, May 19, 2003 |
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A couple of months ago a good friend talked me into installing Cygwin's GNU distribution. At the time I was a willing, but somewhat frustrated, user of 4NT, TSE, a messy implementation of GNU utilities from a now-defunct company, ScriptEase Desktop, and some other licensed software. Outside of Visual Studio.NET, these were my core tools for development. However, I was getting tired of the upgrades (and their costs) and the somewhat proprietary nature of my environment. It worked for me; I liked it a lot, but it was never available on another machine unless I set it up (costing me more money). Thus the Cygwin trial. I have not been doing any .NET development for the last two months so I have been able to focus in on the GNU tools. I'm still not sure about Emacs compared to TSE, but I am getting comfortable with it. Bash allows me to do just about everything I did in 4NT - although there are some things I miss (I really liked 4NT's directory history). On the other hand, I love the filter-style of programming that GNU pushes and Bash so readily supports. I haven't tried doing anything in GNU that would replace ScriptEase and do not plan to at the moment. ScriptEase is a great tool for Win32 console programming; I'm not familiar with the GNU equivalent. One highlight for me has been working with AWK again. What a fantastic tool for working with text files. It isn't right for every problem, but it is darn good when it comes to quickly matching patterns, extracting data, and summarizing results. 'Nuff said about that. |
