General tips for using cygwin

Creating a unix shell for Cygwin

You'll quickly find out that the default shell provided is a crappy windows console. It isn't too hard to create something decent as a replacement though, if you know how.

First you need to download and install the rxvt package if you haven't done that already. Run the cygwin installer and select rxvt from the shell tab, and download it. rxvt is a vt102 terminal emulator btw.

After you've done this, right click your desktop and create a new shortcut, name it rxvt or something. Rightclick on the shortcut so you can edit the properties. In the properties menu select the shortcut tab, and enter the following text in the target field: C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -sl 1000 -name rxvt -title rxvt -iconName rxvt -bg 0 -fg 15 -cr 2 -fn "courier-15" -fb "courier-15" +sb -tn xterm -e /usr/bin/bash --login -i

In the start in field enter: C:\cygwin\bin

Save the changes, double click the short cut, and voila, a pretty terminal at your service.

-- contributed by Scandum

Add the following to ~/.bash_profile to prevent the ā character encoding issues while using rxvt.

LANG=en_US; export LANG

-- Jindrak

Using PuTTY as a shell in Cygwin

I like to use PuTTY as my ssh client, but there is a patched version that works as a Cygwin terminal, too. Just download the patched version([PuTTYcyg]), put it in "C:\Program Files\puttycyg" (you can use it side-by-side with regular PuTTY), and create a session using "Cygwin" as the protocol.

Save the session as something meaningful, e.g. "cygwin". Then you can create a shortcut to the executable and session name, for a good rxvt/terminal replacement:

"C:\Program Files\puttycyg\puttycyg.exe" -load cygwin

Make sure "Start In" is set to "C:\Program Files\puttycyg".

-- MrChucho

Make bash tab completion work like NT cmd shell tab completion

In your .inputrc file add

set completion-ignore-case on
"\t":menu-complete

-- Tyche

How I have RXVT and other stuff setup

Create an rxvt.bat file in the Cygwin directory and created a desktop shortcut to it.

The CYGWIN error_start directive is used to run a program when something crashes. dumper.exe creates a .core file and gdb.exe will attach an the debugger to the process. The default is to produce a stack trace .stackdump. The Cygwin codepage:oem sets the font set to the original PC-DOS hardware set. This is handy when running Midnight Commander, CTetris and other curses based programs which use the drawing characters.