Comments on: MinTTY Gives Cygwin a Native Windows Interface

By: me.yahoo.com/caderik05

me.yahoo.com/caderik05 — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:09:48 +0000

Cygwin stays on my list of top geeky stuff. It’s not linux and it’s not windows – something complex in between. I never figured out all the details of some unix commands through cygwin.
Instead, I decided to install linux in a virtual machine and I just fire it up whenever I need to do serious command line stuff.

By: Tom Hirashima

Tom Hirashima — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:27:52 +0000

Not bad. I personally used Console2 a lot back in my cygwin days. tabs and a native win32 interface. not quite as pretty, though.

By: jim

jim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:26:23 +0000

Have you looked at Console? I only just started playing with it, but I think it does everything you want, including tabs.

By: ak2

ak2 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:17:55 +0000

What’s the Windows theme in the screenshot? It does look rather good.

By: john

john — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:23:28 +0000

I couldn’t get mine to look as sexy as yours, but a nice tip nonetheless. Love the site, Gina.

By: ak2

ak2 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:07:38 +0000

@Donnie: MinTTY uses Cygwin’s pseudo terminal devices (“ptys”), which are implemented using Windows pipes. Native Win32 apps expect to talk to a console rather than a pipe though, which often causes trouble with interactive programs. You could try running E through ‘run’ or ‘cygstart’.

By: Donnie Clapp

Donnie Clapp — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:35:17 +0000

Thanks for the tip. MinTTY looks and feels great, but it won’t launch windows programs for me. For instance, I use the Textmate clone E for coding (which, incidentally, comes with CygWin). From the regular CygWin Bash shell, I can type e . in a directory to open that directory as a project in E. In MinTTY, e . just hangs and never does anything. I have to Ctrl-C to end the command. Any idea what’s going on?

By: Joseph Schnurr

Joseph Schnurr — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:26:36 +0000

Another good option is to run an rxvt shell from cygwin directory. That along with Tabbed Cygwin, gives you tabs, and a “real” unix shell. No transparency though