A better shell for cygwin
So, I’ve been using cygwin for a while now and I am not impressed at all by the default shell for the following reasons:
- 1. It’s clumsy. I can’t resize properly.
- 2. Doesn’t take NUL character apparently
- 3. Backspace is acting weird so far.
- 4. cmd.exe looks ugly!
However, putty is pretty amazing in terms of usability. I finally found the solution with puttycyg which adds an option to run a cygwin terminal session on putty.
http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/
Here’s something that you can do to get even better results:
1. Download the release / Compile the source code from subversion repository (I, for one being lazy, just downloaded the release)
2. Make a shortcut of the included putty.exe (to desktop/start)
3. Right click the shortcut, and select properties. Add the following
putty.exe –cygterm -
This will just open just cygterm without selecting anything in the GUI.
With Lauchy, it’s just about pressing Alt+F2 and typing puttycyg now.
Hi, you might be interested in minTTY as well, which is based on PuTTY’s terminal emulation and Windows frontend parts. It’s smaller, easier and more xterm-compatible than PuTTYcyg, and it provides a few extra features such as window transparency, mousewheel scrolling in ‘less’, and the ability to place the command line cursor with a mouse click.
Download it from http://mintty.googlecode.com or install it through Cygwin’s setup.exe, where it appears under “Shells”.