I use cygwin a lot and emacs a lot. As I was recovering my machine, I came across this great list of useful ideas which includes:
I also like to use rxvt instead of the standard console. The command line looks like this:
Useful Tidbits
1. You may want to disable your virus checker when running the Cygwin installer. Don't forget to re-enable it when you're finished installing.
2. If you are planning on installing CERN's Root, I recommend going to the 3.4.4.3 version. Root 5.14 (or later?) should be immediately compatible with this release. You may have to build the earlier versions from sources.
3. Cygwin doesn't like it if there is a space in your Windows username. If you have a space, do the following after installing Cygwin:
* Edit /etc/passwd (using either emacs, vi, or even Windows Wordpad)
* Find your entry (it will start with your windows username)
* Take the space out of your username (1st entry) and your home directory (2nd to last entry).
* Quit all Cygwin
* Use Windows Explorer to rename your home directory (C:\cygwin\home\cplager in my case)
4. Cygwin doesn't like spaces in directories. To have access to my program files, I created a 'mount point':
cygwin> mount -f -s -b "c:/Program Files" "/mount/programfiles"
You only need to run this command once.
5. To make access easier to my documents and the decktop, I made the following soft links in my home directory
cygwin> ln -s 'C:/Documents and Settings/cplager/Desktop' Desktop
cygwin> ln -s 'C:/Documents and Settings/cplager/My Documents' Documents
I also like to use rxvt instead of the standard console. The command line looks like this:
C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -sl 1500 -fn "Lucida Console-12" -bg black -fg grey -sr -e bash --login -i
