I’m moving from a Mac to a Windows PC at work, and I’ve been blogging some of the things I’m doing to set up my computer.

There’s two things I wish I could just set up: rsync and a decent command shell.

Rsync

I don’t know how you write a server for Windows, but it’s amazing to me that Rsync hasn’t caught on there. Especially since it was developed by the same guy who gave us Samba. (Maybe that’s the point. Note the direction of the copying arrow.) (Don’t tell me about DeltaCopy. It may be great for moving things between Windows machines, but I’m not hoping to do that a lot. I want a cross-platform solution. I need to explore cwrsync.)

Shell

Cygwin gives you a pretty good set of proper command line utilities. The biggest problem is that it needs a command-line tool like apt or yum to keep it up-to-date. I’m looking into apt-cyg.

But a shell needs a terminal emulator to run in, and Cmd.exe doesn’t cut it. Again, I’m puzzled by the dearth of alternatives, especially since the one Microsoft included was so crappy. There are probably a dozen decent terminal emulators in the Linux world, and a couple for Mac OS X.

So right now I’m trying to figure out cmder. It appears to be a fresh implementation of a terminal emulator.