While I am trying to do more and more within the R native environment, I’m sure I’ll never leave the inconvenience of operating systems completely behind.

I tried Unix tools ported to Windows, but it was incomplete until I discovered Softintegration’s Ch environment and C/C++ interpreter. (I tend to only use the C part.) It has a shell, and you can work Unix commands there to your heart’s content. (Yes, sorry, Ch is not free in its most expansive version.)

Still, having Unix in hand doesn’t solve all the things I need to do, whether a simulation like Ch or Linux. Sometimes I need to write things afresh (in C), and sometimes it’s worth using a good, paid-for product, like a good well-regex-endowed editor, GREP-like facilities, and occasionally a DIFF-like tool. For my work, each of these need to handle gigabyte-sized files without complaining. Even poor (Debian?) Linux seems challenged by some of the files common these days: 8 gigabyte things make some of the tools just choke.

I think I’m mostly native on Windows, although I have large parts of GNUWin32 installed. However, the only thing I use on a regular basis is wc -l and it’s not that that couldn’t be approximated with a quick find /c /v "". And poorly-ported programs that literally try opening a file named * need a for %x in (*) do foobar %x aroudn them. You’ll eventually know this stuff and adapt but indeed, it gets painful after a while. If PowerShell would start faster than 2 seconds I’d probably use it a lot more (well, and I might need to look into the PowerShell integration for Far again since I’m there most of the time, command-line-wise).

In order to make many of them work, it was necessary to make a
mapping for a lot of underlying concepts (i.e. things like having
a “/dev” included in the filesystem)

Yes, Windows is a negative space especially for the Unix tools. Just have a look at the file(system) naming scheme under Windows that broke all the standard Unix tools. Cygwin tried to circumvent such behaviour but you can forget to move a script from any Unix-like operating system to the Windows. It’s better to stay under Unix.

You’re right. Making Window Unix-like or making Unix Windows-like is never going to be satisfying. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

I’m surprised nobody has brought up OS X. Apple goes a great job of managing negative space.

As for PowerShell, it did not ship with Vista by default, but it is supposed to ship with Window 7. And it ships with servers.

You can get Windows to be Unix-like, as you could get any OS to mimick any other OS… however, the devil is in the details. Small things that you will never get working like you need to.

It’s funny, but Microsoft has discovered the command line and created an object oriented shell, PowerShell. It’s becoming easier to do administration via scripts, especially things like working with Active Directory and Exchange.

A lot of people continued/continue to do stuff from the command line using old DOS commands. I’m not sure whether that’s even still possible in modern Windows OS? But in, say, Windows 95 it was still often easier to pop open the command window and fix a problem there rather than to try to navigate the gui.

To every OS its role and strengths. Windows is not very friendly toward ported tools, but has the best consumer applications.

Oh it is painful. So painful.