Yes, this is a python question, and a serious one at that (moving to Win XP)

[dave.benjamin at gmail.com]

Jorgen Grahn wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:37:25 +0200, Christophe <chris.cavalaria at free.fr> wrote:
> > Kenneth McDonald a écrit :
> >> For unfortunate reasons, I'm considering switching back to Win XP  (from
> >> OS X) as my "main" system. Windows has so many annoyances that  I can
> ...
> >> Yes, I know that Cygwin is out there, but last I looked, they still
> >> went through the Win command-line window, which imposes a lot of
> >> restrictions.
> ...
> > Last time I checked, you could install a native win32gui version of rxvt
> > with cygwin. This would give you a better terminal window than that
> > crappy thing you get in XP.
>
> Last time /I/ checked (two years ago or so) that rxvt looked nice enough,
> but was impossible to use in practice. I cannot remember /what/ the problem
> was -- possibly it was that it could only run CygWin-compiled commands, or
> something vital only worked with CygWin-compiled commands. Google probably
> knows more.

Cygwin comes with a fully-functioning X server, from which you can run
just about any terminal program you like. For awhile, I was using
Konsole, but KDE on Cygwin is a bit slow and buggy. Recently I switched
to "mrxvt", which is like "rxvt" but with tab support and keyboard
shortcuts almost identical to Konsole. It's easy to compile for Cygwin,
and so far I'm really enjoying the improved speed. Here's my .mrxvtrc:

mrxvt*bottomTabbar:     true
mrxvt*scrollBar:        false
mrxvt*font:             neep-alt-bold-14
mrxvt*boldFont:         neep-alt-bold-14
mrxvt*foreground:       snow
mrxvt*background:       black
mrxvt*geometry:         80x40
mrxvt*saveLines:        65535
mrxvt*hotkey*Dummy:     Ctrl+Shift+underscore

I like my tabs at the bottom, Konsole-style, and don't really like
scrollbars on terminals. I use the Neep Alt font, which is nice for
coding because it makes 'l', '|', '1', etc. all look different, and I
like thick console fonts. I was a Fixedsys diehard for a long time. The
"saveLines" variable lets you increase the scrollback buffer
(shift-PgUp/Down) pretty high - I have it maxxed out. And that last
line tells mrxvt to ignore C-_, which is undo in emacs. There are still
a few other keyboard bindings that I'd like to turn off at some point.

One drawback of mrxvt is that it doesn't support UTF-8. I don't do much
multi-language stuff, but on most Linux distributions the manpages are
in UTF-8, so you get garbage characters unless you fiddle with your
LANG/LOCALE settings.

Oh yeah, and to keep this on topic, Cygwin's Python works just fine in
mrxvt, though the native Windows version doesn't work so well. It
doesn't print any output, which I think is due to buffering... however,
I tend to use PythonWin for interactive development, and emacs with M-x
shell to actually test and run (native) Python scripts. I'm pretty
happy with it, overall.

Dave