"CBeebs" - The Cygwin, Bash, Emacs Combination

"CBeebs" is a shortened form of the BBC's pre-school channel featuring characters like Andy Pandy, Barnaby Bear, Teletubbies and Bob the Builder. "CBeebs" is also the nickname given to the combination of Cygwin, Bash and Emacs on Windows, a highly potent concoction of Linux/Unix tools on Windows.

Each tool has to be appropriately configured. This section will cover some basic customisations that can be thought of as the "pre-school" level of customisations.

1. Cygwin must be configured to have the applications you want
2. Bash is configured via .bashrc
3. Emacs is configured via .emacs

Some basic customisations:

1. This can be done using the Cywgin installer (requires admin rights to access the list of mirrors)

2. .bashrc is normally located in your home directory e.g. /home/windowsjoe/.bashrc
It should contain useful aliases (shortcuts) to speed up interaction with your computer.

Examples:
alias home='cd /home/windowsjoe' -- quickly jump to home directory
alias cdrive = 'cd /cygdrive/c' -- stop typing cygdrive constantly
alias gi = 'grep -i' -- lazy (case-insensitive) grep
alias find = '/usr/bin/find' -- use UNIX find rather than horrid Windows one
alias ls='ls -Al --color' -- ls displaying full information with colors

3. Your .emacs lives in the same directory as .bashrc. It is best edited with emacs itself.

Editing .emacs will be covered in the next post.