Windows Software for Unix Users

The purpose of this page is to provide a list of pointers to free (mostly open-source, but some zero-cost commercial) software that Unix people can use to create a useful and familiar operating environment on a Windows box as quickly and painlessly as possible.

There are binaries available at all of the sites listed here, so you won't have to compile anything. The sophistication of the Windows ports varies - some software installs and uninstalls Windows-style, and some you just untar and use.

I've run all of this software under Windows NT 4.0, and most of it under Windows 2000. I assume that it works under Windows 95/98/Me as well, but I'm not sure since I don't have machines running these.

Suggestions and corrections are welcome. Drop me a line at regehr@cs.utah.edu.

Simon Peyton Jones has made a nice win32 cheat sheet.

Acrobat Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is the standard utility for reading and printing PDF files.

Cygwin

Cygwin is a very useful package that creates a Unix-like environment under NT. It contains the basic GNU tools: bash, gcc, tar, gzip, diff, m4, etc.

dos2unix and unix2dos

dos2unix and its partner make it a bit easier to deal with the obnoxious carriage return characters that make sharing text files between Windows and Unix machines a pain.

Emacs

Whether I'm using Unix or Windows I spend most of my time in Emacs. The Windows port of Emacs is the main reason that I can do serious development under Windows at all. The Emacs for NT documentation contains a list of pointers to Unix tools that have been ported to Windows 95/NT.

Ghostscript

You will want Ghostscript and GSview (a GUI front-end) to be able to view PostScript documents.

GIMP

The GIMP is a free, graphical image manipulation tool that looks a little like Photoshop. Last time I used it, the Windows port was useful but somewhat buggy.

Gnuplot

Gnuplot is an interactive, command-line program for plotting functions and data.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a powerful set of command-line image manipulation tools. Calling these programs from a perl or shell script is the easiest way to automate repetitive image processing tasks.

MikTeX

MikTeX is a distribution of the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems, including a DVI viewer.

PC Pine

PC Pine is a small, friendly, text-mode email and usenet client for NT.

Perl

ActivePerl is a nice port of the pathologically eclectic programming language to Windows.

PGP

PGP provides strong encryption and key management.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a free telnet + SSH client.

Tera Term

Tera Term is a terminal emulator. Be sure to also get TTSSH, an SSH extension.

UWIN

David Korn's UWIN is similar to Cygwin - it provides a Unix compatibility layer over Win32.

VIM

VIM is an improved version of the venerable vi text editor. Also see WinVI and Vile.

VNC

VNC is a remote display system for Windows, Unix, and several other platforms.

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Last modified: Tue Mar 13 19:32:32 2001

regehr@cs.utah.edu