Back to Windows 7 & 10 Home (for some tasks): chocolatey (package manager) and cmder (terminal emulator)

More than 10 years ago I switched to a Mac and never looked back (I still use Debian and/or Ubuntu for servers though, apt is the best!)… until now. For several reasons I’ve been dealing with windows for the last month on a daily basis and I’ve to say I miss the terminal so much! In MacOS I use iTerm2 for terminal emulator and brew and brew cask for app install and I love it and going back to Windows CMD and the whole click-click-click install is not what I would like. And I miss linux- like commands so much! Fortunately I found cmder and it’s working like a charm (it even has support for common unix-like commands like ls , cat and nano . That plus chocolatey is making my life so much easier! Think of chocolatey like brew for Mac or apt for Debian-based linux. Is so much better to search an app in a repository and install it from the command line than to open the browser, search for the website, find the download link, download the file, open the file, click all the buttons and repeat for each app you want. With cmder and chocolatey you have to (once both are installed):

• To search for an app

  choco search name_of_app

• To install an app

  choco install name_of_app

How to install cmder and chocolatey

To get both tools working just follow this steps:

1. Open an administrator cmd and paste the following to install chocolatey

   bash @"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin" refreshenv

2. Run the following and wait a few minutes

   choco install cmder -y

3. Open cmder from the start menu and enjoy your new setup, with a cool terminal emulator and a repository of apps right at your finger tips.

About chocolatey: The package manager for Windows

Visit their website at https://chocolatey.org/

• 4,737 Known good packages (apps; as of 2019-03-02)
• Package submissions go through a rigorous moderation review process, including automatic virus scanning.
• The open source version is enough for me. You can check their editions here

I’ll be using chocolatey in future how-to guides to install apps so stay tuned.