What shell / terminal to use?

[George Kiagiadakis]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 16.03.10 16:54:12, John Layt wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> What's the best shell or terminal to be using under Windows?  I've seen a
>> couple of different bash ports out there, and there's always cygwin but that's
>> rather heavy.  All I know is using cmd.exe or even PowerShell will send me
>> insane very quickly :-)
>
> Unfortunately those two or Console2 (which is just a nicer gui around
> cmd.exe) are the only way to develop KDE apps on windows - AFAIK. At least
> running cmake from cygwin won't work, you need a real windows command
> prompt for that. Not sure about bash-ports, the ones I've seen so far all
> used cygwin or msys and neither of the two will get you proper buildsystem
> for windows.

You can use bash from msys, but you need to comment out a few lines
from a cmake file (don't remember which right now, but it is easy to
find by looking at the error when you try to generate mingw makefiles
from cmake in bash). It works fine, but you need to be careful with
the libs that it finds. For example, it tends to find zlib from msys,
which is wrong, so you need to manually check and fix the cmake
variables using the cmake gui the first time you configure a project
(or run cmake from cmd.exe for the first time, then switch to bash).

Except for this little problem, everything else works fine. It offers
all the nice features of a unix shell and you can also use any
existing shell scripts that you may have around for developing kde on
linux. For example, I use cmakekde & friends from techbase (modified a
little bit) to build kde on windows without problems.

Regards,
George