Inspired by I-57

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
  [+]View Code BASH

  @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.

Update 12/15/06: You might check out the new Parallels Transporter beta, http://forum.parallels.com/thread5999.html It looks like this will do all the below, but without the ftp
server in the middle?

Please note that you absolutely require at least Parallels build 1940 to run G4U.

1. On your new mac, go to the Accounts control panel and create a user named “install”. Give it a password. You’ll need this account later.
2. While you’re in the control panels, go to Sharing and enable the FTP server.
3. On your OLD mac:
4. download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
5. Fire up your Virtual PC, and capture the above ISO in your CDrom. Reboot if neccessary so that you boot off of it.
6. Make a note of how large this disk image is.
7. When you get a prompt, you want to copy your disk to your new server. Assuming you have one disk and one partition on this disk, use something like uploaddisk yournewmacip diskimage.gz wd0 .
8. wd0 is the name that g4u knows your first disk as.
9. diskimage.gz is the name your disk will be saved as on your new mac
10. Wait until the disk is entirely copied. At this point you can close your virtual pc program.
11. Now, go to your NEW mac
12. Download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
13. Fire up Parallels and create a new guest OS. Give it a hard drive at least as large as what the Virutal PC guest had
14. Boot your new GuestOS. Capture the G4U iso, and reboot the guest if necessary to boot it.
15. When it’s finished booting, run the following command to download and unpack your disk image: slurpdisk localhost diskimage.gz
16. Wait for this to finish.
17. Uncapture the cd rom, and reboot your GuestOS.
18. Go to your sharing control panel, and turn off FTP
19. Go to your accounts panel, and delete the install account

At this point, you should have a working copy of your original Guest OS.

For more information, please see the G4U home page at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/