[vox-tech] using windows pathnames in cygwin

[Jonathan Stickel]

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Tue 31 Jan 06,  1:37 PM, Micah J. Cowan <micah at cowan.name> said:
> 
>>On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 04:28:15PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
>>
>>>In cygwin, I'd like to type "vi /etc/profile" and have gvim come up,
>>>editing /etc/profile without necessarily running X.  That means I need
>>>to rely on a win32 installation of gvim, rather than the gvim that comes
>>>with cygwin.
>>>
>>>I've installed win32 gvim in C:\Program Files\vim, but when I do:
>>>
>>>   /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Vim/vim64/gvim.exe /etc/profile
>>>
>>>gvim comes up with:
>>>
>>>   "Cannot open swap file for \etc\profile", recovery impossible
>>>
>>>and I find myself editing an empty file.  Eventually, I'd like to make
>>>"/usr/bin/vi" an alias for "/cygdrive/c/Program
>>>Files/Vim/vim64/gvim.exe".
>>>
>>>Is there a way to use win32 gvim from within cygwin and have the
>>>pathnames work out?
>>
>>Crap. Probably not. What I'd recommend is writing a wrapper script that
>>translates the paths for you. Which might be more work than it's really
>>worth.
>>
>>Myself, I've been using the X version of gvim under cygwin. I hate using
>>the DOS-console-running-bash method; I could never get the control
>>sequences to work the way I wanted. So, I always have X running with xterm
>>anyway; might as well take advantage of it.
> 
> 
> i've never really used cygwin before.  how exactly is X supposed to work?
> 
> i've run 'startx' just because i didn't know what else to do.  got something
> that looked like an xterm and was able to run cygwin's gvim from that.  but
> it seems ... very unsatisfying.
> 
> is there a way to just let cygwin take over the entire window?
> 
> how do you have your cygwin/windows environment set up?  i'd like to emulate
> someone's setup who has something comfortable.  don't have the luxury
> anymore for massive experimentation like i used to.
> 

I recently started trying to use cygwin myself.  While Googling I 
noticed a lot of recommendations to use the rxvt terminal.  It seems 
fine, like xterm but with a sidescroller bar.  I also discovered that X 
and an x-based terminal can be started immediately by running:

cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat

I edited this file to start the rxvt terminal rather xterm.  This is now 
what I execute whenever I want to use cygwin now.  I quickly get an rxvt 
terminal that can launch x-apps if desired.

I did read that you can start X in such a way that you get a big X 
window that takes up the screen.  I don't have much use for this myself. 
  Two resources I found helpful were:

www.zieg.com/faqs/cygwin/
x.cygwin.com

Hope this helps.  Sorry if I repeated information that someone else 
gave; I didn't take time to read all the posts to this thread :(

Jonathan