Terminal window for Cygwin

The default Cygwin console sucks - it inherits all the evil features of Window's cmd.exe like bad copy-pasting, getting to full screen mode is a pain...

I have lately been using minTTY and it's been great. You can install it through Cygwin. Other details can be found here. All your favorite linux bash shortcuts, like Alt-B, Ctrl-K, should work fine. The only thing it misses compared to my all time favorite terminal, Konsole, is the ability to have tabs.

You can also taka a look at other options here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701895/best-terminal-environment-for-cygwin-windows
http://blasphemousbits.wordpress.com/2007/02/27/other-cygwin-console-alternatives/

Setting up email on Cygwin

I couldn't find the mail command on Cygwin. Finally, this what I had to do:

Install email from Cygwin setup.exe.
setup.exe - email is present in the Mail Category packages.

Configure email.conf:

cp /etc/email/email.conf ~/.email.conf

vi ~/.email.conf (change the following lines)

SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.yourdomain.net'
MY_NAME = 'Sweet Seattle'
MY_EMAIL = 'kirkland.is.awesome@gmail.com'

That's it. You are ready to send emails now:
grep @rest.route rest.py | sort | email -s 'REST calls' somewillsomewontsowhat@takerisks.com

Remember that if you don't configure the email.conf, you'll get an error "sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: No such file or directory" because it's expecting to use sendmail.

Running two Firefox profiles at the same time

It's helpful to have multiple FF profiles as you experiment with plugins and try out various options. I find it useful to have one profile where I disable images (cutting down distrations and have perceived faster page load times). You may have noticed that FF normally doesn't allow to run multiple profiles at the same time.

This can be averted using the following command:
firefox -P Default -no-remote

More details are here:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/2518/firefox-profiles-for-plugin-management/

Familiar typing in Putty

I guess, almost everyone, resorts to Putty for connecting to production servers running linux from their windows desktop. I have long hated Putty's hot key interpretation. I miss my bash hotkeys Alt-B, Alt-F, Ctrl-K, etc. (even Home and End) in the Putty realm. Everything that I try gives the annoying '~'. Much recently, I stumbled upon:
http://superuser.com/questions/94436/how-to-configure-putty-so-that-home-end-pgup-pgdn-work-properly-in-bash

And my Putty frustration vanished instantly. In a nutshell, you just gotta set the terminal-type String under the Connection --> Data tab from “xterm” to “linux”.