Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Most used tool

What is the most used tool in my daily work life? The Java compiler? IntelliJ IDEA? Perl?

Actually it is Mark Edgar's PuTTYcyg, a PuTTY patch for Cygwin terminal. This runs BASH from Cygwin inside a PuTTY xterm-ish window, making my daily work on Windows rather more productive.

You see, I'm a command-line sort of guy. And BASH is indispensable to my habits; hence Cygwin. And the default DOS box terminal is lame.

Using PuTTYcyg is a cinch. Download, unpack and add a shortcut to your desktop for C:\puttycyg-20070320\putty.exe - (or wherever you unpack to; the important part is the trailing solo hyphen). I usually change the icon to the Cygwin one (%SystemDrive%\cygwin\cygwin.ico, YMMV).

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