Ruby

Rather than get right down to the details with Hamilton C Shell 2009, I’d like to take a moment to give a bit of software history. The reason I feel this is imperative is that most people buying software today that didn’t use computers until just 3-5 years ago don’t know about the quality of software that used to exist.  When you bought software, you got a big thick manual, a solidly built product that was meticulously optimized for speed and reliability, and a product that didn’t need an upgrade every few days or weeks via some sort of automatic upgrade mechanism because it wasn’t well tested and well delivered.

If you choose to buy Hamilton C Shell 2009, you’ll get such a wonderful product.  That’s rare these days.  I purchase quite a bit of software in my line of work, both for my own use, my companies use, and my client’s use.  The quality of the non-open souce software that I’ve been obtaining has gone downhill considerably.  Gone are the manuals and the optimizations.  To keep the product running, I have to update it sometimes on a weekly basis.

When I first downloaded the demo of Hamilton C Shell 2009, I was wondering how I was going to really put its paces at 10 commands per session.  I’d start digging in then have to restart it.  However the author, Nicole Hamilton, was very helpful and kind and provided me a full copy for evaluation.  Once I installed the full version, I was able to put it though quite a bit.

I should note first that I’m using Windows 7, x64 edition.  I’m not sure if the product has been tested on this platform, but it works on all Windows platforms from modern editions back to Windows 95.  You’d really be hard pressed to find any product for Windows that has such amazing backwards compatibility.

I do a lot of Ruby / Rails development, PHP work, and some occasional C programming as well, so I’m almost always in the shell when I’m in Windows.  When doing Ruby work, I’ve found it easier to just use a Linux machine that I have setup for all of my programming tasks, mainly because of bash, my favorite shell, but also because many of the UNIX tools are there too.

That’s the interesting part about Hamilton C Shell though.  It’s not as a UNIX emulator like Cygwin. The author states that she didn’t want to emulate UNIX, rather design a shell specifically for Windows.  I’ll have to admit, at first, I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not, but my opinion quickly changed once I started using the product.  I found myself using UNIX commands to navigate my Windows file system.  Never before had I been able to do that natively.  Sure, Cygwin let me do this on Windows, but not in Windows, natively working with the files and directories in the way that Windows deals with them, not trying to make them bend to the UNIX way.

Being the UNIX/Linux fan  that I am, I really had trouble at first adopting to this paradigm.  Soon though, I had sort of a software epiphany (and yes, you’re truly a computer geek if you have software epiphanies).  I realized that all of my searching for the perfect way to balance the UNIX and Windows world was over, and it was finally time to quit making Windows do things it shouldn’t be doing.

It’s really rare for a piece of software to dramatically change my outlook on a platform or on how I do my daily tasks.  This was the command prompt that I’d always been missing in Windows.  Before I was trying to take bash, the proverbial square peg, and trying to make it fit into the roundish hole that is Windows.  Little did I know the answer to most of my command prompt problems was there all along – since 1988!

The only learning curve I suffered with the product was in that I’m used to the GNU convention on some command line switches.  For example, I’m used to clobbering together command line arguments without separate minus signs (i.e. ls -la instead of ls -l -a), but this isn’t a right/wrong way, it’s just different.  The performance of the native utilities like tar is wonderful, and while I didn’t perform a proper  full benchmark, it seems faster than the Cygwin emulation of tar.

One other item I noticed is that when firing up Mongrel on a Rails project, the CTRL+C didn’t work correctly to terminate it.  I had to use the Task Manager in Windows to terminate it.  No big deal really, I suspect it’s something simple to fix, and likely not Hamilton C Shell’s fault, or even Mongrel’s, but an artifact of the Windows Console.  I’ll dig a bit deeper and figure out what’s going on there, but its a minor problem, and one that’s very easy to work around.

I was able to do all of my usual tasks while working with my files and with Ruby without any other problems, and got them done much more efficiently.  I will have to dig into the manual a bit more to find out about customizing the prompt more to my taste, but I’ll get to this eventually.

This software has even got me to thinking about writing and/or porting some clones of commands that don’t exist in Windows yet, like rsync and top. Yes, I know you can use rsync with Cygwin, but it’s not the same.  It’s not native to Windows.  Before the author told me about her product, I would have said this was fine.  Now I see it’s not, and it has honestly excited me about using Windows again.  The author also told me that she’s working on adding full UNICODE and better UTF-8 support.

As for the price of Hamilton C Shell 2009, at first I thought it was a bit steep at $350 US.  Then I realized that you really do get what you pay for here, and that this product is worth every penny of that price.

Even as I write this, I’m trying to think of the last time a software product changed a paradigm for me.  It’s happened many times for sure, but not lately, and not anything on Windows in recent times.  This review has honestly left me grateful to the author and to her product for breathing fresh air into the Windows console for me again.

Windows command line users and developers, your days of UNIX envy are over.  You now (have had for nearly 20 years, I just didn’t realize it) have a command line to be proud of!