Cygwin is a wonderful tool. However, I don’t really like the default terminal. This article shows how to set up an rxvt terminal instead.
This is a screenshot of the default cygwin bash prompt:
Copying and pasting is not intuitive, you can’t stretch the box horizontally, and most importantly, it breaks the illusion that I’m on a Unix box. But a better terminal option exists! When you install cygwin, you can also install the rxvt package. After installing the rxvt package, try this in a DOS window:
C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fg gray -bg MidnightBlue -fn "Lucida Console-14" -e bash --login -i
You should see a terminal like this:
As far as I can tell from my experience, this terminal acts exactly like a regular rxvt terminal on a linux box. I can highlight some text with my mouse, and then paste it by hitting either shift+insert or by hitting the middle mouse button. I can resize the terminal horizontally and vertically.
I set up a taskbar icon so that I can get that rxvt very quickly. The icon before the right-most icon will start an rxvt terminal for me.
Setting it up was really simple. I made a new shortcut by right-clicking on my desktop, then I copied this text:
C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fg gray -bg MidnightBlue -fn "Lucida Console-14" -e bash --login -i
into the target field:
Then I hit OK, and then dragged the new shortcut into the taskbar, and that’s it!
Thanks, this really helped. However, when drag selecting with the mouse in Vim, the text isn't highlighted until I let go of the button. Any ideas?
Steven, not sure about that one. I know that there's lots of ways to tweak the way vim handles highlighting though, so I suspect that's what is going on.
Good luck!
Thanks Andy!
For an alternative that fits better with the rest of Windows, you might want to have a look at MinTTY, which is based on PuTTY's terminal emulator. More info and downloads at http://code.google.com/p/mintty
Apparently I cannot paste text into the terminal. That discards it completely.
Do you mean in MinTTY? Nothing at all, either via middle click, context menu, or Shift-Insert? There's a known issue with pasting into ncurses apps discarding all but the first line, but otherwise it should be working. It'd be great if you could give a few more details, or even better submit an error report via the issue tracker on the project page.
Hi, MinTTY is now available as Cygwin package, to be found under the 'Shells' category of 'setup.exe'.
It would be great if you could give a few more details, or even better submit an error report via the issue tracker on the project pages with in it.
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I tried puttycyg, and finally i am using “Console” (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/).
I tried puttycyg, and finally i am using “Console” (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/).
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regards
poly banger
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Just tried mintty — it's great!