Re: Using MSYS as Emacs shell

On 2010-04-10 2:37, David A. Cobb wrote:
>    On one Windows machine, I have both Cygwin and MingW32+MSYS
> installed.  To go with it, I have both Cygwin and Windows native emacsen.
> On the native system, I find using MS cmd.exe as the shell is sub-optimal.
> Would it be possible to set up MSYS as the shell?
>
Yes.

I find myself using bash as default shell make my job more convenient.

I set env var

   SHELL=/bin/bash

as global, so not only Emacs understand but also RXVT use this value.

To make MSYS/Cygwin path work also use cygwin-mount.el
(get it from emacs-wiki):

   (load "E:/home/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/cygwin-mount.el")
   (cygwin-mount-activate)

Nice, now M-! and M-x shell use bash!

Some internal Emacs lisp don't know about such Emacs shell use
on Windows, so you can have trouble on some commands.

Now day I switch completely from using MSYS
as dumb instrument for daily use. For example
sed from MSYS too old and dont know -i option
which allow replace in file without temporary file.

MSYS need only as lightweight addition to MinGW
for compiling packages.

In other corner in Cygwin
you feel much like in Linux + to you available
ready to use useful command line packages
(indent,tidy,ssh client/server,latex,...), ruby/python/perl,
VCS (cvs,svn,hg,bzr,git),...

Note. I early use bash for M-x shell and cmproxy.exe for M-! by:

   (setq explicit-shell-file-name "bash")
   (setq shell-file-name (concat exec-directory "cmdproxy.exe"))

--
Best regards!


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