Tuesday, September 09, 2008

RXVT and Cygwin

I don't like the dos-window that Cygwin launches in by default. Instead, I install the RXVT package.

Benefits:
1) Copy and paste doesn't break lines.
2) Completely customizable xterm-like window (scrollbars, colors, sizes, etc)
3) Completely resizable to almost your entire screen (nice for tailing log files, looking at exception stack traces, etc)
4) More pleasing

Dislikes:
1) About the only thing I have found that I don't like about RXVT (which I bet there is a solution for) is that it uses middle-mouse to paste. Since I use Putty a lot, and Putty uses right-mouse to paste, I always get them mixed up and end up doing the wrong darn thing.

Installation and Configuration:
1) Run the Cygwin setup app -- http://cygwin.com/setup.exe
2) Install the RXVT package
3) Create a new shortcut for "E:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -e /bin/bash -login"
4) Create .Xresources file in your Cygwin $HOME dir:


rxvt.font: Lucida Console-12
rxvt.boldFont: Lucida Console-12
rxvt.scrollBar: True
rxvt.visualBell: True
rxvt.loginShell: True
rxvt.background: Black
rxvt.foreground: White
rxvt.saveLines: 3000
rxvt.cursorColor: Green
rxvt.scrollBar_right: True
rxvt.geometry: 125x50


That's it. An alternative option is to specify all the options on the rxvt cmd line.

Update: I was curious to see if there was an easy way to change PASTE from middle-click to right-click. Found this posting, but it requires you to compile RXVT from source: http://mpuentes.blogspot.com/2007/11/cygwin-rxvt.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

SHIFT-left-click works for pasting from the clipboard

Anonymous said...

You can try X-Mouse Button Control to swap right and middle click. Be sure to set this as an Application configuration for only rxvt.exe.