Windows – Cygwin on Windows: Can’t open display

cygwin;displaywindows

I am running Windows 10 on my Surface Pro 3. I installed Cygwin and also added some useful packages (gvim, nedit, emacs, vim, g++). However, when I run gvim, I get "Can't open display". The same thing happens with nedit. When I did echo $DISPLAY, I showed nothing so I set the DISPLAY to :0.0. I still get "can't open display." I tried removing cygwin and re-installing but I get the same problem.

Best Answer

Unix GUI programs display through an X server. Cygwin doesn't automatically start an X server. You need to install the packages xorg-server and xinit, and run startxwin.

Related Solutions

I’m not getting syntax coloring in vim (using Cygwin)

You have to set vim in the non compatible mode, so it doesn't behave like vi. You should switch syntax on and switch on filetype detection and plugin detection. Here is a minimal .vimrc you can try:

set nocp
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on

This will make vim behave somewhat nicer and give syntax coloring. But there are a lot more things you could change.

You should install something like pathogen or vundle, so you can easily install new syntax files and other scripts.

X11 Fonts – How to Configure Fonts on a Remote X Connection (XDMCP vs. SSH)

I believe XDMCP is using the fonts local to the Solaris system. When you SSH you're using fonts that are local, since in that scenario you're the X server and the Solaris box is the X client. You can use the command xlsfonts to see what fonts are accessible to you on a given system.

EDIT #1 - Font path

You can find out your system's font path using the command xset.

Example

$ xset q | sed -n '/Font/,/DPM/p'
Font Path:
  catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d,built-ins
DPMS (Energy Star):

This path can include paths to local directories as well "paths" to other font servers. These will show up as port@host types of entries.