Tweaking msys and cygwin

I’ve been using msys and cygwin to have a sane command line environment when working in windows. Something I didn’t know how to fix until today was the lack of input and display support for accented characters and the weird behaviour of the del key. I finally got it all working as I want it tweaking some configuration files.

With this, openssh, gvim you can feel a bit more like at home :).

To tackle the accented characters I had to add an ~/.inputrc file as this one:

"\e[3~": delete-char
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on
set input-meta on

To have a bigger console window on startup I’ve changed the cygwin.bat call (and msys could be done in a similar way) to:

rxvt -fn '8x15' -geometry '80x50' -title 'cygwin rxvt' -bg black -fg grey -tn xterm -e /usr/bin/bash --login -i

A minimal .bash_profile to import alias and other settings:
# .bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi

and a small .bashrc with colored dirs and the right localization settings:


# .bashrc
alias less='less -r'
eval `dircolors -b`
alias ls='ls -F --color'
LANG=es_ES@euro
LC_ALL=es_ES@euro
LANGUAGE=es_ES@euro
LC_TYPE=es_ES@euro
LC_CTYPE=es_ES@euro
OUTPUT_CHARSET=es_ES@euro

export LANG LC_ALL LANGUAGE LC_TYPE LC_CTYPE OUTPUT_CHARSET

NOTE: those files must use unix style line endings to work properly.