Right now to interact with Windows Command Prompt I use a wrapper called Console2. It adds some basic functionality to the Command Prompt like tabs, and copy/paste. It’s an improvement but not great because it’s still just a wrapper around the primitive command prompt.
So I’ve been slowly transitioning over to Cygwin. Last week one of my buddies showed me what to add to my Windows PATH variable to to allow Cygwin to see the local filespace. I was, and still am, confused about why adding paths inside of the Cygwin filespace allowed Cygwin to see the rest of the drive, but it worked.
But today I noticed something interesting. One of the minor annoyances of having to use the Windows Command Prompt at home and OSX at work is that in windows you have to use dir instead of ls to view the contents of a folder and I have to remember to switch back and forth.
But today, ls worked! It was such a little thing that I didn’t even notice till I had done it a few times. I realized (I think) this is because the paths I added to the PATH variable mapped the functions from Cygwin to rest of the Windows environment.
Neat! A nice surprise.