While playing with XP on my system, I’ve picked up the usual Open Source stuff most people know about: Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, etc. I’ve tried to find a few other things, but it seems some are just not available.
Nano I can get, but I can’t get it to do any spell-checking. I have Aspell installed with a dictionary, of course, but Nano can’t use it. I get this cryptic message about not being able to create a TEMP file because it doesn’t exist or something like that. All my Googling reveals nothing on that for Windows.
I can get an ancient version of Joe, but what’s the point? I need the syntax highlighting. I’ve found discussions of getting the latest to build on XP, but no conclusive information whether it will or won’t. Further, nobody offers for download any binary copies after version 2.9.6. So I guess I’m out of luck.
I’ve also been searching for a serious CLI editor for XP, but most of those are ancient DOS programs which often don’t work at all on XP, giving errors and crashing of the program. I guess nobody considers the Windows CLI worth any trouble any more.
What about Cygwin? Pretty much works out of the box.
I may do that someday. My lack of interest in Cygwin revolves around some of the same issues which disappointed me over Linux.