As a developer, I’m sure you can appreciate the inherent problems in relying on proprietary components you have no control over.

Not trying to “convert” or otherwise convince you to switch and all that. Just saying that it is an important point that shouldn’t be overlooked when making a choice about your development process and products, specially on the long-term.

“What about the rest of the stack? Commandline svn, tar, you know. Any tips/links/overviews you can give?”

- svn : I get a commandline from installing TortoiseSVN

- tar, grep, etc. I get from installing UnxUtils and setting the path to point to the bin where are the *NIX executables are (cp.exe, etc.).

I find it a bit awkward to find the right version or repository of UnxUtils. Everytime I have to set it up I google for it.

Sidnei:

You’re definitely a much more meaninful coder than I will probably ever be and I truly admire your programming history/experience/skills. In fact I’ve been long enough in the Plone community to see a shift in your position about Windows. However most of your arguments – and also those of commenters – focus on utilitarian aspects e.g. “getting the job done”.

No doubt windows is in some respects very slick. I’ve been using it 95 % of the time over the last 20 some odd years. However, I feel an urge to move away from Windows for reasons other than utilitarian. I’m willing to sacrifice some of the goodies of Windows and MacOS for sustainable community development. I don’t know when that’ll happen, but that’s my target.

Free as in my 2 cents.

Yves

You mention emacs (hurray), so that doesn’t sound like you’re using wingware, eclipse’s python thingy, etc.

So: you apparently have a good cmd.exe replacement. What about the rest of the stack? Commandline svn, tar, you know. Any tips/links/overviews you can give? We’ve got some customers that do a bit of developing themselves (on windows), that’s why.

Reinout

My point is that switching environments is difficult and it is not likely to happen unless there is a driving need. Mine was to have a Unix core with a nice desktop environment (limi is right, cygwin just doesn’t cut it). OSX fits that need…

I have to say though, in the past year what has really sold me on OSX is the obsessive developer community. Mac apps have a level polish that no other system comes close to. It’s nuts. It makes it worth putting up with the zealots (granted, if you dig deep enough in any community you will eventually discover a group of zealots, or at least some smugness[1]).

As for running XP on a Mac, Parallels is indeed fantastic (VMWare is turning out to be very nice as well). Note that you don’t ever need to “move to Bootcamp” because both Parallels and VMWare can boot from the Bootcamp partition, so if you really need that little speed boost that running XP natively provides, it’s always an option.

Anyway, I’m straying off topic. If XP is working well for you, that’s great, keep on using it. You have the benefit of owning a MacBook so you can use any system that suits your fancy. If you can live without Quicksilver, more power to ya :)

[1] An aside: one of the things that I have always liked about the Python/Plone/Django community is that the “smugness and zealotry” level is minimal. In general, it’s a very level headed group.

As I said, I believe in tools that get the job done, not on using technology because of it’s ‘coolness factor’. Don’t get me started on ‘Windows is only for games’. The XBOX is good for games, and the PS3, and the Wii. PCs are not good for games.

Using Windows might not be cool, but Windows has a rich development environment with several tools and technologies that are just not available anywhere else.

.NET and COM for example, keep surprising me. If you take a look at the pywin32 mailing list, there are people using COM to automate and embed the most diverse applications.

Now, say I want to build an IDE for OS X and embed some components from TextMate into my app. Is that even possible?

I love Colloquy, and it’s my most used OS X app, even though I seldom use OS X. And Keynote just rocks, though Office 2007 comes a close second.

The Omni suite is amazing but I never actually had to use it for anything. You must understand that, as I’m just a developer. Some of those editors have Windows-equivalents btw. There’s a TextMate clone in the early stages, and there’s DarkRoom. I was one of the first to discover Quicksilver, btw.

Some of the things you mentioned are really good points, and people should have those in mind when considering moving from Parallels to Bootcamp:

– Parallels boots *way* faster than Bootcamp
– You get OS X wi-fi handling, bluetooth, dual monitor, audio card, etc.

The last one is really important. It saved my day once when I used my phone as a bluetooth modem to connect to the internet via GPRS.

IMHO, unless you use windows for games, there is nothing else it can do better than OS X.

cheers

- TextMate
- CSSEdit
- QuickSilver
- Colloquy
- Keynote
- MacPorts (I know Windows has CygWin, but it’s not the same :)
- OmniGraffle / OmniOutliner / OmniFocus
- Pixen
- Tofu
- WriteRoom

etc etc.

These applications have no equivalents on Windows that come close to the quality and sheer joy of use.

And then there’s all the small things like UI consistency, shortcut key consistency, wi-fi handling, startup time from standby mode, audio card handling, dual monitor handling, internationalization handling, font rendering (and the insane quality of the default fonts), Bluetooth handling, flawless phone/computer synchronization, I could go on and on. :)

But hey, use whatever works for you. I just know that I’m much more productive in OS X than anywhere else. Of course that’s going to be a very different thing for different people.