Babun

At its core, Babun is an open-source utility build on top of the Cygwin project, which is a vast collection of libraries and tools that act as an emulation layer and that can provide a Linux-like console for operating Windows.

In spite of the fact that it is not fast, the installation is straightforward and requires little attention from your part. After download, you can decompress the archive and run the install.bat script and the application does the setup automatically within a couple of minutes. You should know that if you can specify a location for the installation by using the /target option.

Once the installation is complete, you can enter your commands and operate Windows in a similar manner as you would Linux. While the utility was build on top of Cygwin, it is necessary to mention that the application itself is a pre-configured, out of the box variant. As a side note, if you happen to have Cygwin on your system, you will be happy to learn that there is not going to be any interference with the application.

The idea behind the utility is to provide you with an optimal user-experience for anyone who would like to use the shell to write the source codes for the applications they are developing for instance. In fact, the program comes with a plethora of packages, handy tools and scripts that can make a developer's life so much easier.

You can employ a wide variety of programming languages, such as Perl or Python, or use custom scripts, like phpaste or pbcopy, for example, when working on your project. Lastly, the utility includes a plugin-oriented architecture and hence, permits other developers to contribute to the development of the program.

While it has been argued that you might as well just switch to Unix if you want to dedicated most of your computer time to write code, let us not forget that most users are bound to Windows due to the fact that some applications solely work on Windows. Babun is a utility that enables you to add a Linux shell to Windows that enables you to reap the advantages from both operating systems.