1. 1. It’s clumsy. I can’t resize properly.
2. 2. Doesn’t take NUL character apparently
3. 3. Backspace is acting weird so far.
4. 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.

I name this file np (in true Unix fashion of naming things as shortly as possible ) and place in my ~/bin for maximum adaptability.

#!/bin/bash
# Edit your cygwin files in notepad++, the best windows editor.
# Vim and emacs don't seem to work too well in cygwin.
ROOT_DIR_WINDOWS=D:\\\\cygwin
expandToWindows() {
	y=`echo $1| sed -e 's/\//\\\\/g'`

	echo $ROOT_DIR_WINDOWS\\$y
}
expArg=`expandToWindows $1`
echo $expArg
/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Notepad++/notepad++.exe $expArg
 

Just copy this script into your ~/bin or /usr/bin and make it executable to run as

np <file you want to edit>

So, this runs just like any other unix script. I don’t know if you can pass multiple arguments for notepad, if so feel free to extend this piece of code and give me a howler so that I can improve too.

Of course, you can do the same for any other windows application.