Use PuTTY as Cygwin terminal

“Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.” This means, you can use linux/unix commandline tools like ls, grep and find on your Windows system. However, the default installation of Cygwin uses Windows’ default commandline terminal cmd.exe, which is not really handy. Fortunately, there’s a solution to use PuTTY as Cygwin terminal.

  1. Download and install Cygwin. The setup will download all needed packages, so make sure you check what you need (my main reason to install Cygwin was to have a Git client on Windows)
  2. Download PuTTYcyg and extract the contents of the archive anywhere on you hard drive
  3. Start putty.exe, select Cygterm as connection type and enter - (dash) as command. Enter a session name (e.g. cygwin) in the text field below Saved Sessions and click on Save.
  4. Create a shortcut to putty.exe. Right click the shortcut, select Properties and append the following string to the target field: -load "cygwin". Of course you have to replace cygwin with the name of the session you saved in PuTTYcyg.
  5. Open the shortcut and you should directly get into your Cygwin shell