Under the windows cmd shell, there’s a command start that “does the right thing”. Give it a file, it’ll launch the right app and open it. Give it a directory, you get an explorer window there.
This doesn’t exist under cygwin’s shells, which is a PITA.
Here’s a zsh function to do the same thing. Put it in your .zshrc and call open FILE or open DIR.
open()
{
if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then
targetDir="."
else
targetDir=$1
fi
/cygdrive/c/windows/explorer.exe /e,`cygpath -w "$targetDir"`
} |
I tend to prefer unix-like environments, which means I love mac as a desktop and linux as a server os.
But I’m at a new job, and my desktop and laptop are Windows. Here’s a short list of things I’ve done to make windows more unixy for me. Apologies in advance to the people who wrote these programs– I’m not comparing your awesome programs to someone else’s because I think you’re derivitive, I’m doing it because it quickly helps a Mac user understand the value.
- Cygwin is a unix-like environment that runs inside of windows. Under there, you can compile most unix applications, run (native) perl, python, whatever. It’s good. It’s free. Once you have this, you have native open ssh, etc.
- While you’re at it, change the default cygwin shortcut to point to a batch file that contains the following, it’s a much nicer shell than the default windows dosbox
@echo off
C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin
rem bash --login -i
rxvt -bg black -fg green -geometry 80x48 -e bash--login -i & |
- Rocketdock is a nice mac-like dock. Just like on the mac, it supports things like minimize-to-dock, cute hover animiations, etc. It also has “live” images of what minimized windows look like. Nicer in many respects than the XP taskbar, and similar to the Vista one.
- Launchy is a quicksilver-like hotkey launcher. It’s very, very nice. Hit alt-space and type “word” to launch Microsoft Word, etc. Speeds up application launching immensely.
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