cygwin tricks

(So I don't forget)

Other Terminal Emulators

rxvt is inexplicably slow on my current machine (the rendering/scrolling is like 2fps). Here are some alternative terminal emulators; some might be OK though I haven't used them enough to decide:

• PuTTYcyg -- a PuTTY patch. This now seems pretty great and recommended. Just unzip it somewhere, and make a shortcut to "putty.exe -cygterm -" or "putty.exe -load mysession" and there you have it.

• Terminator -- uses Java (!) and can't wrap long lines (!), but otherwise looks promising

• Poderosa -- tabbed, but Shift-PgUp/PgDn don't work for paging. Uses .NET (!)

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Settings for rxvt console

I find rxvt a bit nicer than the default cygwin console, which seems to live in a DOS console window. Shift-PgUp/PgDn works for scrolling, the mouse selection isn't rectangular, and the terminal type is more likely to work when logging into remote servers. Here's my shortcut command-line:

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fn "Lucida Console-14" -geometry 160x60 -sr -sl 1000 -e /bin/bash --login -i

Script to launch documents from bash, using Windows file associations

UPDATE : this script is deprecated. There is now a built-in "cygstart" command that does this; I guess they revived it and renamed it. I have aliased it to "start" by putting "alias start=cygstart" in my ~/.bashrc

This is something similar to the "start" command in the NT command shell. In an older version of cygwin, there was something called "winspawn" that I relied on, but it seems to have disappeared when I upgraded.

---- begin script ----
#!/bin/bash

# Dan Martin converted this to bash and fixed the chmod's.
#
# Thanks Randal R Schulz and Stefan Leppert for basic clues.

fn="$1"

# add execute permissions if there are none
isexe=1
[[ -x "$fn" ]] || { isexe=0 ; `chmod a+x "$fn"` ;}

win_fn="$(cygpath -w -a "$1")"

cmd /c "$win_fn" &

# We want to wait for the windows shell to execute the file before we
# turn off the exe bit.
sleep 1

# if isexe is 0, then we had to set the execute permissions, change back
((isexe)) || chmod a-x "$fn"
---- end script ----

Put that somewhere in your path, and "chmod a+x" it. I call it "/usr/local/bin/start", so it works like the cmd.exe version. Dan Martin added the isexe fixes. Stefan Leppert clued me into the 'cygpath' command. Randal R Schulz posted to the cygwin mailing list with a query about the permission problem, which had me stymied for a while.