This will run an X-Windows server on the background. Perhaps more useful is the other exectuable, XWin Server.
More sophisticated Window Managers and Desktops are available as packages to be installed later if you want.
The Cygwin-X menu within the Windows Start menu contains two executables: “User script” will launch a large windows within which you will have a running X-windows environment, with a basic Window manager and no desktop enviornment. Will create a link allowing access to the user’s Windows home directory from within the user’s home directory in Cygwin. running within the Cygwin terminal the commands It is possible to set up symbolic links to make key Windows directories easy to reach from within Cygwin, e.g. So as can be seen it is possible to access any directory from either Cygwin or the regular Windows Command Prompt. … is equivalent to the following in the Windows Command Prompt: The following table explains this better and gives further information: Executing with the Cygwin terminal … Also, note that Cygwin is all contained within a single folder in your Windows machine, though there is a directory called “/cydrive” within Cygwin that allows you to access the rest of the Windows system.
“/” is the root directory, “~” is your home directory, etc. When navigating through files and directories, you must remember that the notations for paths used within Cygwin are as in Linux, i.e. you just need to run “Cygwin64 Terminal”. Running the Cygwin terminal and working with files and directories Once Cygwin and Cygwin/X have been installed, you will have two new folders in your Windows “Start” menu: “Cygwin” containin the executable “Cygwin64 Terminal” and “Cygwin-X” containing “User script” and “XWin Server”. However, the initial installation takes quite long as it is so you may want to leave those for later.
The latter is essential as it contains Cygwin/X (no xinit, no graphical applications!) You may also want to include some of the packages you will want to install later on in the initial installation.
The same Windows executable needs to be run every time you wish to add, remove, or update a package.įor the initial installation, include all the core packages and also the xinit package. You do it by running the script cygwin.exe found here. So using emacs kinda makes sense for coding in Lisp.First go to the main website and install cygwin. And emacs has really good Lisp integration, especially with the Slime plugin installed. I've just started trying to relearn Lisp. In fact, I'm having far more trouble getting used to emacs than I had getting used to vim! But I am having touble remembering all of the strange, esoteric and somewhat counter-intuitive keyboard shortcuts. I'm currently taking the plunge and trying to learn emacs too - which can also be ran from the command line. But if you want something more powerful, or you have more complicated editing needs I'd heartily recommend vi or vim! As the others have said, for simple tasks you probably don't need anything more complicated than nano.
I only tend to use VS for debugging nowadays!Īt the end of the day a text editor is a text editor. Whereas grep just starts searching instantly and generally tends to return results quicker than VS's search functionality. And it always seems to rebuild itself at the most inopportune moments. Often, when wanting to look something up in VS - I have to wait for the intellisense database to finish rebuilding. Going off-topic here, but using grep seems to be much faster than using VS's built in search functionality. One for diffing/editing files in vim and another for running scripts and grepping through our code-repositories. On my 2nd monitor, I always have two cygwin terminals open. I've even started using vim extensively on my Windows machine at work (via Cygwin terminal). Since learning to use vim, I've found that I can be far more productive using vim than any other editor I have tried before.
In fact I'd now go as far as saying it is my favourite text editor full-stop. Nowadays, I seem to spend a LOT of time with vim in the terminal. It took a little while to get my head around using vim, but learning to use it properly was time well spent IMHO! Until I got to grips with vim, I used to use nano quite a lot for editing text files on the command line.