man/help incompatibility with macOS vs Windows

[kelly-sovacool]

man ls works in macOS Terminal but not in Windows Git Bash. ls --help works in Windows Git Bash but not in macOS Terminal. Is there something we can do (e.g. software to update in Git Bash) to make these OSes compatible? I suspect the Windows Subsystem for Linux would work the same as macOS Terminal. Do enough learners have a recent-enough Windows version to take advantage of WSL?

[kelly-sovacool]

Sorry @cbkerr that you ran into this while teaching. I'm surprised we hadn't noticed this problem before.

[kelly-sovacool]

Windows Terminal was just released last week! Should allow our learners to use Bash or Zsh. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-is-now-the-default-in-windows-11/

[pschloss]

Polled learners at the 2022/10/20 workshop and maybe 60% of windows users were using Win11 and 40% were on Win10; no one was on an older OS. I don't think pre-Win10 is supported any longer with security updates. I'd be in favor of forcing WSL or seeing if Win10 folks can install the new terminal.

I wonder if we have any UMCarpentries folks who are Win users that could offer guidance here. There's also powershell, but I don't know how that differs from the default Command Prompt