Are you a Linux junky who has suddenly found themselves forced into a Windows environment? Perhaps your company is making you use Windows or maybe a less technical friend is having computer troubles. Either way you've found yourself crushed under the heel of Microsoft's oppressive shell, cmd.exe. Over the course of this little tutorial we are going to change that. Rise up my brothers and sisters, you have nothing to lose but your shitty shells.
##Package Management First myth on the hit parade, windows doesn't have a package manager. That's not true. Well, ok. It doesn't ship with one, but we can add one fairly trivially. We will use Chocolatey NuGet. Let's start by popping open the God forsaken piece of software known as cmd.exe. Run this code:
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin
Dope. Now we have a package manager. Chocolatey usually installs under the root of the C drive. We will refer to this directory as %CHOCOLATEY_HOME% from here on out.
##Fixing the Console Window Next we will fix the Console Window. You can't do a lot of fairly standard things with CMD that you can do with other native window frames. Like, say, resize the window correctly or copy/paste. To fix this we'll install ConsoleZ. ConsoleZ is console window enhancement that is a fork of Console2. It allows you to do the vast majority of things that you expect from a modern shell window. To install run the following on the command line:
cinst ConsoleZ
Now just to make things a little easier, let's pin ConsoleZ to the Taskbar. Go to %CHOCOLATEY_HOME%\lib\ConsoleZ.1.9.1.13351\tools and pin the Console.exe to the taskbar. From here, you can customize ConsoleZ to your liking. There a couple of janky things by default, so you may want to fix those. I have checked in my configs for references.
##Version Control Because its not a real computer until it can run Git. Now we can install Git via our package manager:
cinst Git.Install -notsilent
So here's a small bit of sadness. The windows version of git won't respect your user's home if you don't add Windows Explorer Integration. So you have to use the actual installer. Fortunately, we can still install via Chocolatey. Once the Installer comes up you'll need to select several options. Make sure you select to Windows Explorer Integration and pick the simple context menu, but don't check any of the sub options. Make sure to overwrite the windows command prompt (The last option in the list). Also choose checkout as-is and commit as-is. Now you have a real computer.
##Bash Because we need a real shell. So Git for windows ships with Bash. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Go into ConsoleZ's settings (ctrl+s) and set the shell to be bash. It can be found under %GIT_HOME%\bin. Now restart your shell and you'll being running bash.
Now having read all of this you're probably thinking, 'Typical windows. This sucks.' Well have I got just the panacea for you. In this repo, you'll find a little piece of semi-auto magic called setup.bat. If you copy this file down and run it, most of the work will be down for you. I use phrases like 'semi-auto magic' and 'most of the work' because you still need to do a little leg work with the git installer. I'm working on it.