Latest cygwin.bat - need one

Jeremy Bopp jeremy@bopp.net
Mon Dec 12 20:19:00 GMT 2011


On 12/12/2011 11:44 AM, Mike Brown wrote:

snipped doc references...

> In other words, no where in the documentation is it stated that mintty is now
> the default startup.  It all leans toward cygwin.bat as being the way things
> are started.
> 
> So, just what is a user supposed to think when reading the documentation.
> When I did the install, I told it not to install the desktop shortcut, as I
> already have one.  There was no indication during the install to inform the
> user that mintty is now the default startup, instead of cygwin.bat.

Those are good points about the documentation.  The change to mintty
happened fairly recently though, so I'm sure the documentation will be
updated sometime soon to reflect the current reality.  You may be able
to contribute patches for the documentation if that interests you enough.

> At this point in time, I have no clue as to how to set up cygwin to use it,
> just to see what it is like.

I would try installing fresh to a new directory and taking all the
defaults, from package selection to shortcut creation.  Leave your
current installation alone since it probably has some settings you don't
want to lose or that may interfere with a fresh Cygwin experience.  Once
you figure out what your original installation needs, you can copy those
changes over either manually or by re-running setup.exe as necessary.

> The rxvt program has been working for me.

I used to use rxvt a long time ago, but it's dead upstream from what I
last heard.  Don't expect much help if it doesn't work in Cygwin.  Urxvt
is probably your only option if you *must* use something like rxvt for
some reason.  It requires X to be running though...

Mintty is a big improvement over the Windows terminal and rxvt, so give
it a try.  If you don't let setup.exe create the shortcut for you, it's
as easy as creating a shortcut that runs mintty as follows from within
the bin directory of your Cygwin installation:

mintty -

That will start a login shell for you using the shell you have
configured in /etc/passwd.  From there you can configure mintty by right
clicking to open a context menu and opening the the configuration
dialog.  You can find more documentation by reading mintty's manpage.

Good luck.

-Jeremy

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