puttycyg

Posted by cwage @ 01/20/2006

I am a big fan of the cygwin suite of UNIX tools for windows, but one of my biggest annoyances was that the shell you run in cygwin is always displayed in the most horrid terminal environment (basically a glorified DOS window).

Enter puttycyg -- it allows you to use putty as a raw terminal emulator (i.e. without telnet or ssh) in running your cygwin shell. From puttycyg's README:

RATIONALE

The Windows Console is an inadequate terminal emulator. It is impossible
to resize horizontally without pulling up a dialog box. It is impossible
to send an ASCII NUL. Basic keyboard options do not exist such as
configuring the ASCII character sent by the Backspace key.

Some solutions for these problems already exist. One can use xterm or rxvt
instead of the Console. One can also telnet or ssh to the local machine
over the loopback interface using almost any terminal emulator including
PuTTY.

However, one should be able to use Cygwin with a decent terminal emulator
without having to install Cygwin/X or to install telnetd or sshd.

Pretty cool.

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