Configure Cygwin to be usable

Since my current job forces me to work on Windows most of the time, I desperately tried to get any shell/terminal on Windows shell to the same level as all other *nix shells in the 20th century. It turned out to be an endeavour but with a decently working bash in the end.

After trying MinGW, Cygwin, MKS ToolKit, and supplementary terminal emulators like Console2 and ConEmu, I finally stuck with Cygwin. The best terminal emulator (the application that runs the shell) for me is the mintty.exe that is shipped with Cygwin. It supports copy paste (even though through weird short cuts), window resizing (yay!), terminal colors, and different terminal fonts - you see I became pretty frugal over time.

The key for me were the following steps:

  • Make minimal Cygwin setup and install additional stuff separately (i.e., git, subversion, cmake, etc.)
    Why? Because installing both the Cygwin version and the separate installer causes strange problems
  • Setup keyboard short cuts etc. in mintty.exe
    Why? Because short cuts are the ohly way to stay sane, even if you copy using Ctrl-Ins and paste using Shift-Ins
  • Add additional stuff to system’s PATH variable
    Why? Because I want to use the installed stuff from within Cygwin
  • Create startup batch scripts (see below)
    Why? Because I wanted to develop or at least build from within Cygwin
  • Install SP1 of VS2010
    Why? Because otherwise environment variables tmp and TMP make problems among other things
  • Clone and install nesono-bin from github
    *Why? Because then I have colors, a good prompt, useful setup of bash and zsh (if I really want this), all my helper tools, history search backwards using PageUp, etc.)

And actually, that’s it. So if you come from Linux, Mac or some other *nix system and you want to have a useful shell on Windows, don’t search around like me. It will safe several years of your life just to stick with Cygwin and get it work on a minimal level.

Startup batch scripts

The startup batch which is shipped with Cygwin script is located in C:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat if you used the default location for your installation and contains the following content:

@echo off

C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin

bash --login -i

To have access to Visual Studio tools you need to create another batch script that loads the environment in Windows cmd.exe and then start your mintty session from there.

I am using the following construct for Visual Studio 2010 (which also includes the Azure SDK):

@echo off

echo "Loading Visual Studio environment..."
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
echo "...finished"

echo "Loading Azure environment..."
call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\.NET SDK\2012-10\bin\setenv.cmd"
echo "...finished"

set CC=cl
set CXX=cl

echo "Starting mintty..."
start C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico -
echo "...finished! Over and out :)"

Note that I also add CC and CXX environment variables. I found this useful for some build systems, but may be optional and you decide to include them on your own :)

Now you should add start links e.g. in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Cygwin that point to the newly created batch files. I create the links by copying and modifying the existing Cygwin link and renaming it.

That’s it again,
iss