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Setup for Windows

NOTE: Windows is not an ideal operating system to use for this type of work. Ideally running a Virtual Machine of Ubuntu is a much better option and will provide you a better learning experience for this course than using Windows. If for some reason OS-X or Ubuntu (Linux) can't be used, these steps include a way to setup Windows in order to be able to follow along with most of the material in the course. There are still issues and incompatibilities that Windows faces that generally make doing development from the terminal & repl more difficult.

This guide will help you setup a software development environment on Windows 7 and above. By the end, your computer will be configured with a bash terminal.

This guide is mostly compatible with older versions of Windows.

The Terminal

Included in Windows is the Terminal—an app that runs a Unix shell.

Sadly, Windows does not include a Unix shell. So this tutorial will fix that.

Install Git for Windows

Git for Windows is a lightweight, native set of tools that bring the full feature set of Git to Windows. It includes Bash, a popular Unix shell, which you'll use to run the git command line just like other Unix environments.

To get started, download and install Git for Windows. There are a bunch of installation options, but you can use the defaults if you're feeling overwhelmed.

Once installed, use the Start Menu to launch Git Bash.

Windows

TIP: Don't be distracted by the Git GUI program.

Once launched, you'll see something like this.

Ignoring the welcome message and the git help, here's a quick break down of what you're seeing in the Terminal app.

Component Description
Adron Name of your user account
PHOTON-PC Name of your computer
~ (home directory) Name of your working directory
$ Prompt symbol

Any characters you type will appear after the $ prompt symbol. Go ahead and type uname. After pressing the Enter key, you'll see something like this.

Here's what happened:

  1. The shell waited for you to type a command.
  2. You then typed the word uname which appeared after the prompt.
  3. You pressed the Enter key which triggered the shell to accept your input.
  4. The shell searched for a program called uname.
  5. Once found, the shell launched the uname program and handed it control over the Terminal.
  6. While running, the uname program told the Terminal to display the word MINGW32_NT-6.1.
  7. Once finished, the uname program exited and handed control of the Terminal back to the shell.
  8. The shell told the Terminal to display another prompt.
  9. Once displayed, the shell began waiting for your next command.

Simply stated, a Unix shell works like a read-evaluate-print loop or REPL.

Change the Terminal

The default Terminal app in Windows has no support for copy and paste keyboard shortcuts. Weak! Let's change that.

To get started, download Console—a modern Terminal app for Windows. Once downloaded, extract the app to C:\Program Files like this.

Once extracted, add a shortcut the Start Menu.

Launch the Console app and ignore the security warning. Navigate to the Edit > Settings menu item and check the box on the bottom left to "save settings to user directory".

Click the OK button to save and close the Console app for now.

Back in the original Git Bash window, run the following command.

NOTE: The ../assets/config.xml is located inside the repository, so verify that the repository has been cloned or copied appropriately for the file to pipe into the console.xml in the AppData directory locally.

#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p ~/AppData/Roaming/Console
curl -fsSL "../assets/config.xml" > ~/AppData/Roaming/Console/console.xml

TIP: To paste, right click the title bar and choose Edit > Paste.

Now, relaunch the Console app—ignoring the security warning again—and you'll see something like this.

Finally, close Git Bash and the new Terminal App should work with copy & paste support.

Next ⇒