I use to emulate a Unix-like terminal on Windows. Even though Cygwin is pretty good in emulating Unix terminal, its UI leaves a lot to be desired for, so I decided to use on top of Cygwin.
Mintty not only looks nicer than Cygwin but it also has some useful features like easy copy/paste, drop & drop of text files and so on. I installed Mintty through the usual Cygwin package installation process and I saw that it put mintty.exe file under cygwin’s bin folder. When I tried to run Mintty by invoking mintty.exe from Cygwin, it worked fine.
Pretty soon, I was changing the terminal properties and making Mintty look like I wanted. So far so good.
The problem started when I created a shortcut to launch Mintty from Windows Start page. I wanted this shortcut to launch Mintty on Cygwin by default.
When I clicked on the shortcut, none of the normal Unix commands would work, I would get a “command not found” error from bash. After Googling for a while and some random experiments, I found out that I had to go to shortcut’s properties and change its target to add a dash at the end. So my shortcut’s target is “C: cygwin64 bin mintty.exe -” Don’t know or care why I have to do this but I wish developers put more thought in the first time use experience of their applications/libraries/packages.
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@NicoleHamilton Cygwin doesn't have access to apt repos. If I want to install a new program and have it work with cygwin, I either have to install through cygwin using the Graphical installer, which can be a bit of a pain, or I have to install a windows binary, then add it to my path, which can also be a pain. The MinTTY terminal window for Cygwin puts a native Windows interface on Cygwin which offers more keyboard shortcuts and colors and styles. Check out the difference between Cygwin and MinTTY side.
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