Take text editors for instance. A text editor is a very basic software and there has been such evolution in them. Line editors, text editors, GUI editors,… and with various advanced features.

ed is the GNU line editor. cat used to concatenate files can be seen as an editor as well.

Joe, Pico and Nano are screen editors with more features than the plain line editors. They allow one to jump to specified line and column numbers, search and replace strings, and allow quick, dirty editing.

Vim (Vi Improved) and Emacs are two legendary editors, the followers of each of which inadvertently take part in the Editor War sometimes without even the knowledge that they are part of a rivalry larger than themselves. While diehard fans of Vim and Emacs claim that their editors are the most advanced and convenient, they are both capable of keeping new users at bay thanks to their apparent complexity which is supposed to contribute to their simplicity. Both of them are screen editors which are used by programmers to write programs in a number of languages. Gvim and Xemacs are the GUI counterparts of the editors. One thing I have noticed is that users of either software need a cheat sheet that has various key combinations that can be used in their daily usage. Let this not daunt you from using these, because they really are worth the struggle. You can get started with Vim and Emacs using tutorials and they are plenty of them.

NEdit, short for Nice Editor, is a GUI text editor.

In case you already use a text editor that you are comfortable with, you can continue to use it from command line in Cygwin itself. Add your text editor with a custom alias in your .profile:

alias editor=”/c/\”Program Files/Editors & Viewers\”/Notepad++/notepad++.exe”

I am a Notepad++ fan and find it very resourceful. I have a feeling that it is inspired from Vim while keeping user-friendliness in mind.

For a greater choice than above, check out this comparison of text editors.

Post from: EveryJoe

Many Cygwin Text Editors

Prompt
export PS1=”\[\e]2;\u@\h:\w\007$green\]\u@\h:\[$pink\]\w\[$blue\]$ \[$BLUE\]”

The PS1 is a defined environment variable that determines how a prompt should behave. It stands for “Prompt Settings”. There are three variables \u, \h, and a \w. \u is the username, \h is the hostname, \w is the complete path of the working directory. The pre-defined colors $green, $pink, $blue, $BLUE (set in the .profile shown) specify the color of the display immediately following. Notice that PS1 seems to have a repetition of \u, \h and \w. The first part — until \007 — sets the window name of Cygwin which otherwise would’ve been something like C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe.

There is another environment variable called the PS2 and is secondary and is set to ‘>’ by default. It is displayed whenever you have pressed Return and the command is incomplete.

History
In command prompt, when you press Up arrow, you can find previous commands you’ve typed within that session. In Cygwin, a user-specified log file of a user-specified size logs all commands and that can allow you to easily run previous commands across sessions.

Aliases
alias pingg=’ping www.google.com’

Alias understandably is your nickname to a command. e.g. When you’re connected to a network and want to find out whether there are any problems with the Internet connection (slowdown or disconnect) you can try pinging www.google.com. Because Google is one of those big sites that rarely goes down or is never too slow. The ping gives you an idea. Instead of the complete command you can now just type ‘pingg’. Remember that this alias takes precedence over any previously defined usage of a command with the same name.

Post from: EveryJoe

The .profile in Cygwin

Cygwin loads its settings from a file called .profile present in the HOME environment variable. By default, HOME is set to /home/<username> which in Windows can be reached in C:\cygwin\home\<username> (assuming you have installed Cygwin in C:\cygwin folder).

.profile can be opened using any text editor. Here you can set colors to be displayed, prompt, history, aliases, default working directory, and any banner you may wish. The colors you choose will interfere with the colors set in your command prompt.

Below is a sample .profile.

————————————————————————————————–
# .profile

# Define some colors first:
red=’\e[0;31m'
RED='\e[1;31m'
green='\e[0;32m'
GREEN='\e[1;32m'
yellow='\e[0;33m'
YELLOW='\e[1;33m'
blue='\e[0;34m'
BLUE='\e[1;34m'
pink='\e[0;35m'
PINK='\e[1;35m'
cyan='\e[0;36m'
CYAN='\e[1;36m'
NC='\e[0m'

# Colors and Prompt
export PS1="\[\e]2;\u@\h:\w\007$green\]\u@\h:\[$pink\]\w\[$blue\]$ \[$BLUE\]“          # Word wrap of previous line.

set -o vi
export EDITOR=vi

# History
export HISTSIZE=1000
export HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
export HISTFILESIZE=1000

# Various Aliases
alias dir=’ls –color=auto’

# Working directory
cd /e/home

# Banner
echo -e “${cyan}”
echo \ \ \ \ \ #======================#
echo \ \ \ \ \ # Welcome back Sravan!\ #
echo \ \ \ \ \ #\ \ \ I missed you.\ \ \ \ \ \ #
echo \ \ \ \ \ #======================#
echo
————————————————————————————————–

The above .profile first defines some colors. One could directly use the color codes but this is more readable. Next, it sets the prompt settings. We’ll go over what the PS1 line exactly means later. The script then sets output display settings, history file settings, aliases, default working directory and banner. Comments are prefixed with a #.

You might have to tweak some color combinations in the PS1 line. I use a variant of the above .profile in combination with a command prompt with colors mainly set to a white background and a blue text as against the default black background and a white text. This is more pleasant to my eyes, giving me a white board and a blue marker feeling.

Let me know if you need further help with this. I’m not going into detail because it is off-putting to discuss too much about colors here.

Image Source: Cygwin screenshot from my PC.

Post from: EveryJoe

Customizing the Cygwin Terminal

I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam mail, conscious about the precautions to be taken in a cyber cafe and disposing e-waste responsibly, sad about the layoffs and the Mumbai attacks, and excited about the Ancient Rome 3D and the LIFE photo archive projects. I also began an ongoing series on Cygwin: pre-introduction, introduction, installation. For all the things in between, refer the November archives.

I thank the readers for stopping by here, the fellow bloggers for link love, the spammers for spam that couldn’t be caught by Akismet, and the fraud bloggers for blog clones. Or not.

Looking forward to a better blogging experience this December.

Post from: EveryJoe

November Month in Retrospect

1. Download the Cygwin setup file, if you haven’t already.

2. Choose the installation type: Install from Internet or Install from Local Directory or Download without Installing. When installing Cygwin for the first time, you’ll have to choose either the first or the last option unless you already have the packages through some other means. I tend to choose the last for two reasons. One, network issues while downloading are preferrable to network issues while installing. Two, a reinstall for whatever reason is faster and smoother from a local directory. However, this will consume a few hundred MB to just download. Disk space these days isn’t an issue anyway.

3. Choose the root directory. I’ll talk about this structure later. Default options usually suffice, but if you have to choose, choose a new empty folder in a drive with several hundred MB disk space, say, E:\cygwin.

4. Even if you’re installing from the Internet directly, a few logs with setup-related information are created during installation. These logs are important for the setup file to recognize the existing states of various packages. Specify where you want these logs to reside in.

5. Choose a mirror that is closest to your location, or just pick any.

6. This is the major step, of choosing the packages. You could simply skip this step, whereby the default base packages will be installed. To experiment more, it will be worth your time to browse through these packages and select a few additional ones. Dependencies like underlying packages and libraries are selected automatically when you choose a package.

There are five modes of View: Category/Full/Partial/Up To Date/Not Installed. Choose the “Category” mode. Every package has a line of info written about it to the right. That should give an idea. I’ll mention the packages being used in the future posts where and when required.

The next step will end the process. If you’re first downloading the packages from the Internet, then you will have to rerun the Cygwin setup file, this time with the “Install from Local Directory” option and let all those packages downloaded be installed.

We’ll use Cygwin, starting with customizing the terminal from next week.

Image Source: Cygwin screenshot from my PC.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Install Cygwin

The truth is Cygwin emulates Linux on Windows. If you replace the Windows background with any of the open-source wallpapers, hide the Windows task bar, and only run the cygwin terminal, you can almost cheat yourself that you’re running a Unix-based OS. This is thanks to a DLL named cygwin1.dll which is the actual Linux API emulation layer.

Cygwin is different from other utility packages providing Unix-like functionality like, say, UnxUtils because of the emulation layer. Cygwin is not using the native Windows libraries directly for Unix-like utilities. That could mean a difference in the speeds of their execution, but we are not benchmarking anything here. This works better to learn Unix-based OSs.

There are also a number of Linux packages that can be installed on Cygwin after rebuilding them from source. These are the Windows-alternatives to the corresponding Linux tools and are not always available on utility packages that are similar to UnxUtils.

You can download the Cygwin setup file from their home page. We’ll run through the installation next time; it should work on most Windows OSs except Windows CE (handheld). I’ve heard about Cygwin-Vista compatibility issues but that could mean errors here and there and not complete incompatibility.

Post from: EveryJoe

Introducing Cygwin

Windows is primarily popular for its apparent user-friendliness. Unix-based OSs are chosen for their open and active communities. Windows is sufficient for ‘general purposes’ like listening to songs, playing games, making documents, sending mail, browsing the Internet. Unix-based OSs may seem more convenient for ‘geeky purposes’ like tweaking with the computer, writing programs, and pushing boundaries.

One feature that strongly separates Windows and Unix-based OSs is the shell. Windows has a command prompt from where various programs can be run using commands. It is more powerful than what most realize but is rarely used. On the contrary, users of Unix-based OSs greatly depend on their very powerful shell (which is run through a computer terminal or console) and run most programs through it.

Users forced to switch to Windows are commonly peeved by the limitations of the command prompt. Nevertheless there is an alternative to make them feel more at home: Cygwin. In fact, there are a few other alternatives, but Cygwin is what I’m very comfortable with and is also, IMHO, more exhaustive than others. Learning Cygwin is very useful even for Windows users to feel more comfortable when they ever encounter Unix-based OSs, or work in a multi-platform environment where you might have to mix Unix with Windows.

From here on, we shall regularly try to learn Cygwin, a nibble at a time. Share this news to your friends who are interested in learning UNIX or Cygwin. We’ll decide on the bite-size based on the community response.

Post from: EveryJoe

Windows, Other Operating Systems, Cygwin