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Comment by diltonm | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree, Cygwin has real OpenSSH, well you can even run Gnome on Windows if you want; even as your main shell or I was doing that back in 2002 not sure it would work these days. Overall Cygwin can't be beat. If Gow has enough utility for folks who want to use it; that's cool but for me when I'm stuck using Windows for anything, Cygwin rocks.

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I run cygwin X so that I can have the tabbed version of urxvt.

I ditched mrxvt long ago because of lack of Unicode support (though I did use it under Cygwin/X).

https://github.com/simonzack/urxvt-tabbed - is this the project you're using?

No, not an external project, just one of the "official" rxvt variants. I use the same one on linux as on cygwin/X.

rxvt-unicode-256color

I use it on cygwin at work because I use it on linux at home, because of the tabs (which are text-based and have nothing to do with whatever desktop environment it's running in), and because the 256 colors make it easier for me to distinguish different code parts in a colored text editing session.

The default terminal in cygwin is OK, but the small number of colors were really bothering me (old eyes).

As for unicode, I've displayed Japanese and other scripts in rxvt-unicode-256color just fine.

Here we go: http://imgur.com/eRea4I2

The right terminal has two tabs open, and it shows unicode displayed in the last command.

This is on linux, it looks the same on cygwin (except it has window borders there).

Oh super, thanks. I'll have to try that out.

FYI, the default terminal for Cygwin these days is mintty, which supports 256 colours.

Wouldn't it be better just to use ConEmu and mintty? I looked at urxvt but the ConEmu+mintty combo had all the features I wanted and was more up-to-date than urxvt.

mintty doesn't have enough colors for my eyes.

I use conemu for my windows command shell. I have tried it to run a cygwin bash shell, but I recall there being some annoyances, don't remember what anymore.

But fundamentally, no, it wouldn't be better to run ConEmu and mintty, because urxvt is exactly what I like. :)

Fair enough if urxvt is exactly what you like. Not sure what you meant by the colour comment though, both urxvt and mintty support 256 colours... http://superuser.com/questions/736873/enable-256-colors-for-...

I tried the above for colors in mintty, nice, thanks.

As for running mintty in conemu, it's still not quite right. If I figure it out, this will be what I recommend to people.

But for me, I like having urxvt the same at home on linux and at work in cygwin. I use urxvt's keyboard management of its tabs a lot.

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