I thought this was an interesting message.
David Andrews
>From: pattist@centris.ains.net.au (pattist)
>Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 22:19:06 +1100
>X-To: access-l@icomm.ca
>Subject: Fwd: Re: VIP-L: relief from the graphical side of windows
>To: gui-talk@NFBnet.org (Multiple recipients of NFBnet GUI-TALK Mailing List)
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>Mailing List)
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>
>
>I thought these messages could be of interest to some people.
>
>Steve.
>
>From: "Tim Noonan" <tnoonan@softspeak.com.au>
>To: "Aaron Howell" <aaron@kitten.net.au>, <vip-l@softspeak.com.au>
>
>A commercial alternative which provides near-unix functionality for Windows
>which I've been using under DOS and now windows 95/98 for many years is the
>MKS toolkit. This product provides 32-bit ports of over 200 unit utilities
>including the standard unix editor ex (and vi, its visual form), ksh (a
>unix shell), job control and all the various wonderful unix text-based
>utilities.
>
>It has commandline utilities for reading from and writing to the registry,
>starting, backgrounding and killing processes, writing to and reading from
>the windows clipboard in a dos box and access to the security features of
>Windows NT.
>
>All these utilities work in the DOS box, and make windows 95/98 the best
>environment for me to work in, as I have the best of both the off-the-shelf
>mainstream gui applications, multitasking etc, and much of the power of
>unix and text-based applications.
>
>In my view, this will be the most difficult challenge for us text-oriented
>windows users in migrating to Windows 2000 (previously NT) because our dos
>screenreaders won't work under this operating system, and the DOS box
>access in products like JAWS is simplistic and sloppy to say the least.
>
>The MKS Toolkit is quite expensive, but if you are a fluent unix person,
>its worth a look. Actually, much of the toolkit may be part-and-parcel for
>Windows 2000 as MKS are now working with Microsoft to provide real
>scripting facilities, something Windows severely lacks at present.
>
> ----------
>From: Aaron Howell <aaron@kitten.net.au>
>To: vip-l@softspeak.com.au
>Subject: VIP-L: relief from the graphical side of windows
>
>I've found a way out of the graphics mess.
>After finally being presented with a project that I couldn't do under linux
>(because it involved linking with some windows dll files)
>I finally got inspired to install the windows port of gnu c (gcc for linux
>users) a totally text based compiler environment that is compatible
>(allbeit with a bit of work) with both unix and windows C sources.
>As well as being the coolest C compiler on the market (cos its free) the
>cygwin (thats the windows name for it) compiler suite provides most of the
>common unix commands under win95 console mode.
>For those of us die hard dos users who have managed to convince our screen
>readers to run in win95/98 dos boxes, this provides a welcome break from
>graphics and mouse clicks.
>Its delightful to be able to write shell scripts under bash that can
>accomplish in 5 lines what it takes pages to do with ms-dos batch files or
>this new windows scripting language thing that I havent experimented much
>with yet.
>then of course there's ed.
>That was the one utility that I *really* missed from linux under windows,
>the version I had was very old and lacked some of the functionality of the
>gnu version and edlin just doesn't cut it.
>anyway it built out of the box with cygwin.
>If you're at all linux-inclined and stuck with having to use windows 9x/nt
>at home or at work then I highly recommend cygwin at
>http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin as a welcome relief.
>If you port anything else useful from unix to windows using cygwin I'd be
>interested to hear about it, I got ncftp to compile, and was going to work
>on kermit
>Regards
>Aaron
>
>Regards,
>Steve Pattison
>pattist@centris.ains.net.au
>
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