There may be other alternatives as well, such as Windows Subsystem, and there are always new software becoming available, but Cygwin and git-bash both have the advantage of being free to install, relatively easy to use and maintain, and which provide all the tools necessary to do work for this class. There are two good UNIX emulators that run in a Windows environment, Cygwin and git-bash. For instance, there is a Windows version of gedit that you can install on Windows, and make available to the UNIX emulator so you can invoke gedit from the terminal emulator. These commands will not work in a terminal emulator (without lots of extra effort which frankly is not worth it.) However, it is possible to run Windows commands from a UNIX emulator terminal window which run in full screen. In a real UNIX terminal window, there are commands for tools such as editors or web browsers which open up full screen applications in separate windows. You can edit files using a windows editor such as Notepad, and those edits will be visible in your terminal window. That means that you can use either UNIX commands such as 'ls' to list the contents of that directory, or you can use Windows Explorer to look at the same list of files. The default disk space in your UNIX emulator will be a sub-directory of your windows disk.

The response to those commands is typed back to the screen and another prompt appears. You get a command line with a prompt where you can type commands. Similar capabilities are available on Apple machines as well, but since I don't have an Apple machine, I can only go into details on the Windows process.Ī Unix emulator provides the capability of opening a terminal window on your laptop that looks and feels like a terminal window on a UNIX machine. If you have a Windows laptop, there are UNIX emulators that make it possible to do the coding work for this class on your laptop. Using UNIX Emulation Using UNIX Emulator Software on Windows

Unix to windows terminal commands