Friday, February 4, 2011

Are there any resources for becoming a Cygwin "power user"?

I've got it configured, but I want more from it...maybe Cygwin isn't the right tool, but I like how it provides a *nix-like environment within Windows.

  • I'm quite interested in this question myself. I've used the Cygwin Setup guide to get set up, but it doesn't get you all the way. One thing that I learned from it, though, is that it recommends leaving the setup.exe in the directory with Cygwin so that you can quickly add packages, since apt-get apparently doesn't work that well in Cygwin. The article also talks about cyg-get as an alternative.

  • I've found Cygwin to be very useful in the past. FWIW, lately however I've shied away from it in favor of the following:

    1. XAMPP
    2. Unixutils

    I like these tools even better.

    David Mohundro : Unixutils is definitely nice. I use that more often myself, but I do use Cygwin occasionally.
    James Sulak : GnuWin32 (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) seems more active. Is there a reason to use Unixutils instead?
    Craig Hyatt : @James no reason that I know of, unixutils is what I was familiar with.
  • If you've already read the Cygwin User Guide, take a look at Ten Steps To Higher Cygwin Productivity.

    Also, if you're using a shell such as bash in Cygwin, and you're familiar with Emacs, consider using Eshell (the Emacs shell) instead.

    Evan : That 10 steps article is quite dated now. Specifically: 2. Use rxvt instead, no need to install the full X if you don't need it. 5. Windows native PostgreSQL is now available. 8. Why cygwin Apache instead of native Apache?

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