CygwinNotes - Tech - The Caboteria

Cygwin is a unix emulation environment for Windows.  If you must use a Windows machine to write code then Cygwin will help.

http://www.cygwin.com/

After installing Cygwin, you'll want to set up logins and passwords.  You can use =mkpasswd= and =mkgroup= for this purpose, and take a look at the =-d= flag if you're running in a Windows domain.

See also http://xfree86.cygwin.com/ if you're planning on running X with Cygwin.  You can run X in either single-window mode (with X inside one big Windows window) or multi-window mode where there is no X root window and X windows "float" along with Windows windows.

=C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat= is a good way to start X.  I hacked it to run rxvt instead of xterm - it seems to be more consistent with the terminals that I use on unix machines.  There appear to be two solutions to cutting and pasting back and forth - download =xwinclip= and run it in =startxwin.bat= or add the =-clipboard= command-line parameter to X.  I've used the command-line =xwinclip= but not the X feature.

=rxvt= can run both as a Windows program and as an X program, depending on where you run it from.  You can make an icon for it by dragging the executable =c:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe= onto the little tray next to the Start menu.  A useful set of properties for the "Target" field is

=C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe --loginShell -bg black -fg white -sl 1000 -e /bin/bash --login=

this opens a white-on-black bash login shell.

Cygwin's rxvt seems to use _^H_ as the backspace character which seems to disagree with most Linux custom and practice, so it's a good idea to =stty erase ^?= in your .bashrc.  Then backspace will work in bash and emacs.

http://www.khngai.com/emacs/bash.php - this page explains how to set up =rxvt= so that the delete key works as expected and so the "home" and "end" keys go to the beginning and end of the command line.

   * [[%ATTACHURL%/bashrc-cygwin][bashrc-cygwin]]: example cygwin .bashrc
   * [[%ATTACHURL%/inputrc-cygwin][inputrc-cygwin]]: example cygwin .inputrc


For a more in-depth treatment of backspace and delete see http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BackspaceDelete/.
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Topic attachments
I	Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment
EXT	bashrc-cygwin	manage	1.0 K	15 Mar 2004 - 12:27	TobyCabot	example cygwin .bashrc
EXT	inputrc-cygwin	manage	0.1 K	15 Mar 2004 - 12:28	TobyCabot	example cygwin .inputrc