A Unix (mac/Linux) user who has been forced to work on a windows machine here :)
I have scripted loads of work in GnuPlot and don't want to switch to other programs at this moment. I would appreciate it if you could help me know how to install GnuPlot On windows (more specifically windows 10). questions:
I know there are two options according to this page, Cygwin and MinGW. which one is better?
I have MinGW installed and I know I need to install one of the options from this page but I don't know which one(s)! and how.
I have searched the internet but it seems most of the search results are for compiling. I don't want to go through compiling and all the hassle.
I tried installing the binary from this link, and when I try to run the program this is the error I get:
Unable to execute file:
C:\Program Files\gnuplot\bin\wgnuplot.exe
CreatProcess failed; Code267.
The directory name is invalid.
I would appreciate it if you could give me a very simple stepwise installation (1 2 3 ...), preferably with visuals, and instructions.
P.S. A nice way to install Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) on Windows and keep them updated, is to use package managers like Chocolatey. There are GnuPlot chocolatey packages here. Just install choco as instructed here. Then use choco install Gnuplot to have the software installed.
You don't have to install MinGW or Cygwin. Actually packages compiled in MinGW are compatible with Windows. Just download the binary of gnuplot from Their repo and you are good to go.
Additional points:
When installing, check which terminals you want to set up; also
check if you want the installer to add the PATH variable to your
system. Also, create a desktop shortcut.
After installation, you should see the desktop shortcut. Clicking on it should open a terminal-based gnuplot (which hopefully you are familiar with).
Please note that I have used the x11 terminal (you can get this working by installing xming). There are other options such as windows and qt terminals, but I am not an expert on using these.
You should have Administrator rights on this machine.
Right click on MinGW, Run as Administrator, install - should be OK.
Good luck!
BR, Alex
You can try
$~ scoop install gnuplot
Installing 'Gnuplot' (5.4.5) [64bit] from main bucket
gp545-win64-mingw.7z (37.7 MB) [=======================================] 100%
Checking hash of gp545-win64-mingw.7z ... ok.
Extracting gp545-win64-mingw.7z ... done.
Linking ~\scoop\apps\Gnuplot\current => ~\scoop\apps\Gnuplot\5.4.5
Creating shim for 'gnuplot'.
Creating shortcut for GNUPlot (wgnuplot.exe)
'Gnuplot' (5.4.5) was installed successfully!
I'm following the instructions of someone whose repository I cloned to my machine. I want to use the make command as part of setting up the code environment, but I'm using Windows. I searched online, but I could only find a make.exe file, a make-4.1.tar.gz file (I don't know what to do with it next) and instructions for how to download MinGW (for GNU; but after installing it I didn't find any mention of "make").
How do I use make in Windows without a GNU compiler or related packages?
make is a GNU command so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:
The most simple choice is using Chocolatey. First you need to install this package manager. Once installed you simlpy need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/admin command prompt) :
choco install make
Other recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10 where you'll be able to install make, gccand all the tools you need to build C programs.
For older Windows versions (MS Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.
An outdated alternative was MinGw, but the project seems to be abandoned so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.
GNU make is available on chocolatey.
Install chocolatey from here.
Then, choco install make.
Now you will be able to use Make on windows.
I've tried using it on MinGW, but it should work on CMD as well.
The accepted answer is a bad idea in general because the manually created make.exe will stick around and can potentially cause unexpected problems. It actually breaks RubyInstaller: https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/issues/105
An alternative is installing make via Chocolatey (as pointed out by #Vasantha Ganesh K)
Another alternative is installing MSYS2 from Chocolatey and using make from C:\tools\msys64\usr\bin. If make isn't installed automatically with MSYS2 you need to install it manually via pacman -S make (as pointed out by #Thad Guidry and #Luke).
If you're using Windows 10, it is built into the Linux subsystem feature. Just launch a Bash prompt (press the Windows key, then type bash and choose "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows"), cd to the directory you want to make and type make.
FWIW, the Windows drives are found in /mnt, e.g. C:\ drive is /mnt/c in Bash.
If Bash isn't available from your start menu, here are instructions for turning on that Windows feature (64-bit Windows only):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
Download make.exe from their official site GnuWin32
In the Download session, click
Complete package, except sources.
Follow the installation instructions.
Once finished, add the <installation directory>/bin/ to the PATH variable.
Now you will be able to use make in cmd.
Install Msys2 http://www.msys2.org
Follow installation instructions
Install make with $ pacman -S make gettext base-devel
Add C:\msys64\usr\bin\ to your path
On windows 10 or 11, you can run the command winget install GnuWin32.Make in the command line or powershell to quickly install it. Than you can use the command cmake.
There is no need to install choco anymore.
The chances are that besides GNU make, you'll also need many of the coreutils. Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it's popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). That won't work without bash. You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows:
Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org/) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX. Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it's slow.
GNUWin (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) It was good and fast but now abandoned. No bash provided, but it's possible to use it from other packages.
ezwinports (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports) My current favorite. Fast and works well. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. It's possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround.
MSYS 1.19 abandoned. Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so)
MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports. Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. I'd recommend this one.
MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that's more up to date.
Note that you might not be able to select your environment. If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). If it's from Linux, you might need to use a real Linux or WSL.
If the compiler is running on Linux, there is no point in installing make for Windows, because you'll have to run both make and the compiler on Linux. In the same way, if the compiler is running on Windows, WSL won't help, because in that environment you can only execute Linux tools, not Windows executables. It's a bit tricky!
I could suggest a step by step approach.
Visit GNUwin
Download the Setup Program
Follow the instructions and install GNUWin. You should pay attention to the directory where your application is being installed. (You will need it later1)
Follow these instructions and add make to your environment variables. As I told you before, now it is time to know where your application was installed.
FYI: The default directory is C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\.
Now, update the PATH to include the bin directory of the newly installed program.
A typical example of what one might add to the path is: ...;C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin
Another alternative is if you already installed minGW and added the bin folder the to Path environment variable, you can use "mingw32-make" instead of "make".
You can also create a symlink from "make" to "mingw32-make", or copying and changing the name of the file. I would not recommend the options before, they will work until you do changes on the minGW.
I once had the same problem. But I am surprised not to find one particular solution here.
Installation from GnuWin32 or via winget are good and easy options. But I only found make 3.8.1 there. This version lacks the very important option -O, which handles the output correctly when compiling multithreaded.
choco appears to offer make 4.3, currently. So one could expect recent versions there.
But there is also the option of self compiling. And if you have to install make, which is used for compiling, this should be a valid option.
head to https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ and download a version of your liking
unpack the tar.gz files (use 7zip and unpack the file twice to retrieve the actual content)
navigate to the created directory
open command prompt in that directory
run build_w32.bat gcc This will start the compilation with the gcc compiler, which you would need to install in advance. When running build_w32.bat without any option they try to use the MSVC compiler. Sidenote: I found it surprising that gnu does not use gcc as default but MSVC :-)
ignore the warnings created during compilation. The result should still be fine
retrieve your fresh gnumake.exe from the directoy GccRel (when compiled with gcc)
put this file somewhere where you like and rename to make.exe
add the location to the system variable %PATH%
As others have noted: This manual installation might cause conflicts if you have various make versions installed by other programs as well.
You can also install scoop, then run:
scoop install make
One solution that may helpful if you want to use the command line emulator cmder. You can install the package installer chocately. First we install chocately in windows command prompt using the following line:
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
refreshenv
After chocolatey is installed the choco command can be used to install make. Once installed, you will need add an alias to /cmder/config/user_aliases.cmd. The following line should be added:
make="path_to_chocolatey\chocolatey\bin\make.exe" $*
Make will then operate in the cmder environment.
Install npm
install Node
Install Make
node install make up
node install make
If above commands displays any error then install Chocolatey(choco)
Open cmd and copy and paste the below command (command copied from chocolatey URL)
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command " [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
For some reasons I prefer to avoid using Python.
But all I found is either Python scripts or unix specific instructions or something that doesn't have downloadable executables or unclear how to install it in windows.
Can you suggest any tool or service?
There is a plugin here for that.
Maybe just install Win-build of CLI-Mercurial or standalone TortoiseHG (plus HG-Git)?
I haven't Python per se on my box, only THG (which have Dulwich) and HG-Git anf Git-repos are pushable
I'm trying to build a packaged open web app with mozilla-apk-cli. But when I try it tells me I need to install unzip and zip from Info-zip. But the Info-zip site is beyond dated and the .msi I ran from there doesn't appear to have done anything.
I'm on Windows 8.1 64bit.
How am I expected to do this?
Until #Ozten fixes this, you might want to just get some binaries somewhere else, like gnuwin32 (zip, unzip) and put then somewhere in your PATH.
I'm the author of mozilla-apk-cli. I don't develop on Windows, so I need your help!
1) I'll do some digging, I assumed (wrongly) that Info-zip would install on Windows 8.1 64-bit
2) What is the preferred tool for zip/unzip from the command line on Windows 8.1? Can you point me at it's documentation?
Thanks for your help in improving mozilla-apk-cli.
Also: I've filed https://github.com/mozilla/apk-cli/issues/3
Update: I've documented how to install Info-ZIP. Thanks to Myk and nmaier.
I've tested this fix on Windows 8.1 and was able to build an APK.
when installing MSysgit, also MSys (as the name suggests) is installed on my machine.
When I additionally install DevKit for Ruby, yet another copy of MSys is installed on my computer. When installing the Haskell Platform for Windows, again another copy of MSys is installed on my machine. Is there any way of installing MSys/mingw once and tell all other software to do a lookup in the Path?
The version of msys that is included in the Git for Windows package is modified and if you attempt to replace it with a stock msys package you will run into problems. I can't comment on the other packages but basically - it is not worth worrying about. Disk space is significantly cheaper than the time you spend trying to make a number of independent packages share a common msys platform.
However, there are in fact people working on trying to sort that out. msys now has a package management system and I know of at least one project attempting to get the Git for Windows build environment working withing that system mingwGitDevEnv.