When I started at my current workplace my world was shattered (Obvious exaggeration). I realized I had to work on windows day in day out. Of course I would be logging in to Linux servers for most of the actual work but I really missed the comfy and friendly unixy tools. Yes there were options but they did not even come close to the user experience I were used to.
So began my search for something that would give an experience at least halfway as good as my Linux on desktop days.. or.. okay Mac times. My search ended when I found Babun.
Their tagline is mostly correct. “A Windows shell you will love”. Once I got this set up, the first thing I did was writing about it on an internal blog our team did. This post is pretty much the same in spirit.
So, Babun is a collection of nice tools with good defaults. It puts together cygwin, Mintty and ZSH with Oh-my-zsh. And it works out of the box (YMMV)
Get it, install and see if you like it. One thing to note is, by default the
$HOME directory will be C:\Users\<username>\.babun\cygwin\home\<username>.
You can change this and set your windows profile directory as
$HOME
If you are here, you are likely to be enjoying corporate proxies. This is problematic to tools like wget and curl. And of course Babun itself because it needs to update itself. So you’d have to find the proxy url from your browser settings and update your ~/.babunrc file. Set http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables accordingly (in ~/.zshrc). Or else you can set proxy settings in ~/.wgetrc or ~/.curlrc too.
Babun offers pact a package manager which is based on cyg-apt. To try it out..
$ pact install tree
We all need tree in our lives.
BTW, not all is sunshine, trees and unicorns. pact install seems to break
things as of writing. the remedy would be to simply run babun update, which
you’d need to do occasionally to keep it all updated anyway. Guess what,
babun update is also broken and doesn’t seem to get much love for now. But not
hopes are lost.
Run following in a cmd.exe
C:\Users\<username>\.babun\update.bat
You might want to get a coffee for the wait.
Once you know your way around this thing, it’s time you personalize your favorite editor, put together a nice SSH config etc.
If you are like me, after some time, you’d notice you miss something. And that thing is multiple sessions. I mean tabs. This is where, excellent ConEmu comes in.
Now I’ll quickly go through the process of integrating Babun with it and making things a bit nicer.
Launch ConEmu and right click on tab bar to access settings. Get to Settings > Startup > Tasks.
This is where we tweak it to load Babun. Create a new profile with [+] button, name it Bbaun, tick “Default task for new console” and set Task parameters as follows.
/icon "%userprofile%\.babun\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe" /dir "%userprofile%\.babun\cygwin\home\<username>"
Also set following as Start console
%userprofile%\.babun\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe /bin/env CHERE_INVOKING=1 /bin/zsh.exe
Now click on Startup and select {Babun} in Specified named task. This will make Babun load in startup console. Get to main > Confirm and untick “Confirm creating new console”. This will stop the annoying dialogue box everytime you open a new tab. Now hit “Save settings” button.
ConEmu and Mintty have had issue working together and ConEmu author says running cygwin Bash directly in ConEmu is the way to go. My colleague (Hi Daas!) tested that but the experience was not that great. So he switched to a combination of Git for Windows and Babun (with Mintty) on ConEmu, which I should try too.
I must add that both Mintty and ConEmu authors are very responsive and helpful, I really admire their work. Same for Babun author, he did a great job. Anyhoo, all these tools do make life so much better at work so thanks again for everyone involved in these prjects <3.
There are new options in newer windows environments but the progress is certainly not evenly distributed. So here’s my writeup for the eight people who might come looking for some solace on windows within corporate barbed wires.