Windows – How to make Cygwin shortcut stick to Windows 7 dock

cygwin;docktaskbarwindows 7

I have recently installed Cygwin on a Windows 7 beta machine. Everything works great, except one little annoyance:

The Cygwin shortcut (Start->All Programs->Cygwin->Cygwin Bash Shell) cannot be pinned to the Start menu. My guess as to why is that I already have a "Console" window pinned to the start menu. My guess is that Windows sees that the two EXEs are the same and won't let me pin it.

This would be fine except I cannot pin the window to the Dock either. While Cygwin is running, WIndows interprets it as just a Command Window and won't let me pin it either.

How do you pin the Cygwin shortcut to the dock?

Best Answer

I just created a shortcut to "E:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i" on my desktop, ran that, and then pinned the resultant process to the task bar, and it seems to have worked.

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Windows – How to make Cygwin open a new window each time I use a Windows 7 keyboard shortcut

From what it looks like, Chrome has a separate way of handling the keyboard shortcut. Trying this on XP, certain applications are opening new instances however most are not. I think it has to be coded into the application to handle the signal differently.

In Windows 7, there is an easy way to open multiple instances of an application though. Simply hold Shift and click on an existing instance of the application in the taskbar.

You could also use AutoHotkey for this. Simply map the shortcut to run the executable:

^!t::Run C:\Cygwin\bin\bash.exe

Make sure you've disabled the shortcut in Cygwin's shortcut properties first though. You'll need to change the executable path according to your environment.

Cygwin – Create Shortcut to Open Bash Shell in Specific Directory

I haven't toyed with UNC paths, but in general you have to use forward slashes instead of backslashes I believe. For regular drives, you can use /cygdrive/c for example to access the C drive.

In a batch file, to open the shell to the root of C: you could use:

c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c 'cd "/cygdrive/c";bash'

You may also be interested in chere a context menu entry for Open bash here:

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Best Answer

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Windows – How to make Cygwin open a new window each time I use a Windows 7 keyboard shortcut

Cygwin – Create Shortcut to Open Bash Shell in Specific Directory

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