Getting closer to the perfect work environment
I had a co-worker peek over my shoulder the other day and said, “Are you connected to a Unix machine?”
“No, that’s just Cygwin.” And I explained to him what Cygwin was.
He laughed. “Most people want Unix to be more like Windows. You want Windows to be more like Unix.”
If course I do! My perfect world would have me working on a Linux desktop but, since that isn’t going to happen, I’ll use Cygwin as much as I can. And lately I have found out that I can really take it to the next level.
I finally figured out how to get around our Firewall-of-Doom to update Cygwin (since we can update Eclipse online, I figured I can update Cygwin as well). In the latest version, I noticed that GNU Screen was on the list. Was that true? If so, my year was made.
So I did the update and then zsh started flaking out on me. That was bad. Really bad. But it got fixed this morning (simply doing “rm ~/.zcompdump” and “compinit” did the trick). Then I installed Screen. Unlike what most people use Screen for, I’m simply happy that I can have multiple prompts and access them without touching the mouse. The copy-and-paste and scrolling options are just gravy.
I got Screen running and then installed rxvt and started using that instead of Ponderosa or Console2. I remember having problems with output from “normal” Windows processes on it (like Java!) but I haven’t seen any yet.
How geeky is all of this? Very. But it’s all to make Windows more and more usable to me — by making it more and more like Unix
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