Re: Running XyWrite III+ under Cygwin

[L Anderson lowella@xxxxxxxx]

Norman Bauman wrote:
>
> Cygwin is a freeware package that looks like unix and runs under windows.
> http://cygwin.com/
>
> Right?
>

Right. To quote from the cygwin home page:

"Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It
consists of two parts:

A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing
substantial UNIX API functionality.

A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look
and feel.

The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta versions of Windows since Windows
95, with the exception of Windows CE."

When you install cygwin, you get a cygwin window (Dos like window) that
gives you a unix like environment that runs GNU's Bash shell(default).
You also get a lot of the Free Software Foundation GNU (GNU's Not Unix)
stuff plus a lot of other GPL software. Cygwin is easy to install
although you do need a fair amount of disk space and a reasonably fast
internet connection (for downloading). From the cygwin window, you can
run not only the unix like utilities: grep, diff, perl, python, telnet,
ftp, wget, xwindows, c/c++, Fortran, assembler, etc. but also Dos
programs.

> But what I don't understand is how you run XyW III under unix.

Install Cygwin, put xywrite in your path (e.g., path=c:\xyw), fire up
the cygwin window, mount the drive (needed only once) on which XyW
resides (c: drive), and enter 'editor' (xywrite). That's about it since
your just running in a 'Dos like window' set up as a unix environment.
I suspect that the Bash shell just passes the 'editor' command to
'cygwin1.dll' which then passes it to the 'Dos like window' for
execution by the windows os. On my machine (550MHz PIII), there is
virtually no difference in speed between XyW in a cygwin window vs a Dos
window.

>
> Do you run it in a dos emulation? if so, why not run it under windows in a
> dos window?

No it's not Dos emulation it's unix emulation. The collection of unix
like tools has been modified to run under MS Windows and the program
'cygwin1.dll' emulates unix so the modified software can be run in a
unix like environment on an MS Windows machine. In fact, you can run
(some) of the cygwin tools in a Dos window if you set your paths right.
However, there are some tools that probably won't work in a Dos window
because they rely on scripts (e.g., Bash) and a unix environment. Some
of the ones I've tried do seem to work in a Dos window.

When I do things that are best done (for me) in command mode, my
preferred editor is XyWIII+. At times, I also want to use diff, grep,
perl, etc. which are well provided by cygwin. So ideally, XyWIII+ under
cygwin is my choice. Hence, the reason for my original question. So
far, the main glitch I've found running XyW under cygwin is that XyW's
cursor doesn't scroll the screen when I move it down the text. The
other scroll/cursor type functions do seem to all work--PgUp, PgDown,
ctrl->, etc.

Based on responses I've seen so far, it looks like I'm the one with
arrows in my back. :-)

Regards,

Lowell


>
> At 03:48 PM 1/12/02 -0800, J. R. Fox wrote:
> >
> >L Anderson wrote:
> >
> >> Anybody in XyW-Land played around with running XyWrite under Cygwin on
> >> Win 98, 2K, XP, whatever? I've started looking at XyWIII+ under Cygwin
> >
> >I guess the first question some of us need to ask is 'What is Cygwin ?'
> >
> >Jordan
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Norman Bauman
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