Babun - a windows shell of my choice

Currently I'm mostly involved in administering my Virtual Machine or working on Linux based OS in my job. I do it from Windows OS because it's my favorite OS right now and it contains all tools which I need to use in my projects (like Unity or Visual Studio). I really needed some tool to connect with my servers. Of course you can use PuTTY but for me it has really obsolete design and it has small amount of packages.

And there we have Babun

I have been using it for about six months right now and I'm really pro console guy right now :)

A few words from the authors :

"Babun has a very small microkernel (cygwin, a couple of bash scripts and a bit of a convention) and a plugin architecture on the top of it. It means that almost everything is a plugin in the babun’s world!" - babun.github.io

Introduction to the Babun Project from Tom Bujok on Vimeo.

So - why do I use it? Mostly because it has features like:

• built in pact package manager - turns your terminal into even greater environment
• SSH
• Git shell
• UNIX tools on Windows
• Linux style copy/paste - click right mouse-button to paste something or highlight to copy
• Option "Open Babun here" on right click - open terminal with current directory as path
• looks awesome!
• open source with growing community

I will focus here on its pre-configured git features

First of all the console looks like this:

Out of the box we have all common used information in one-liner well prepared prompt. Username and hostname are visible on window title bar.

As you can see on authors' website there is bunch of git aliases:

gitalias['alias.cp']='cherry-pick'
gitalias['alias.st']='status -sb'
gitalias['alias.cl']='clone'
gitalias['alias.ci']='commit'
gitalias['alias.co']='checkout'
gitalias['alias.br']='branch'
gitalias['alias.dc']='diff --cached'
gitalias['alias.lg']="log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %Cblue<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative --all"
gitalias['alias.last']='log -1 --stat'
gitalias['alias.unstage']='reset HEAD --'

Usage of git status -sb alias:

For me it is a little nice tool which makes my daily routine work much nicer. I always wanted to have great terminal on Windows and definitely it is the answer to my needs.

Interested?

See product's website or check their Twitter for more information.

Interest fact In real life term -Baboon- is used to name Old World monkeys. Here you have some wiki page about it.