I’m a Linux guy at heart, but like a lot of folks, I’m stuck on Windows at work. But even on Windows, I spend a lot of time in the command line. Now, the whole point of Windows was to get away from the command line, so the default command prompt, cmd.exe, has never been much more than a glorified DOS shell. The alternative for power users, PowerShell, is something I’ve always found to be confusing and terrible.

I want my Unix tools, dang it! And, open source being open source, there have been a few attempts to make that happen, most notably Cygwin and MinGW. But while those are certainly impressive projects, they’re not something I want to try to keep updated for my team, or document for researchers who I want to use my scripts; the install and update tools are just too complicated for that.

Happily, Anaconda is there to save the day. Again¹ . The Anaconda default channels include a suite of tools built with M2, a project descended from MinGW. That means that not only do you get to manage the tools you want with the excellent conda package manager, but you also can easily reproduce your environment elsewhere using conda requirement files. And no administrator privileges needed!

There’s only one drawback, which really isn’t a drawback: you can’t run m2-based programs in the default anaconda environment. Why isn’t that really a drawback? Because it keeps your path clean if you ever need to be using the Windows built-in tools instead of Unix ones that happen to have the same name.

To install m2 (assuming you have Anaconda already installed), just create a new conda environment or switch to one that already exists. Then install the m2-base package. I have one environment called main which I use when I’m not isolating requirements on a project for release. You can create one by running this command (replacing main with the desired name):

conda create -n main m2-base

Now, whenever you want to use your Unix tools, just run activate main (or whatever you called the environment).

Or, if you have an environment you want to use already, just activate it and conda install m2-base.

That will give you all the coreutils, as well as bash if you want to use that. And, while this gives you a perfectly good base system, there are plenty of more tools, like make. Just run conda search m2-.* to see them all.

Is it as good as using Linux? No. No it is not. But as far as I can tell, it’s the next best thing.