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Cygwin: Using console Emacs in cygwin under Windows XP
Thu, 23 Apr 2009

On occasion I install cygwin on a Windows box so I can do some text processing with perl or other mundane tasks. (Usually I keep a VM with a full Unix distribution, be it Linux or FreeBSD on a USB keychain or on the disk.. but Cygwin can be handy, not to mention they've got an XServer and other crazy stuff working very nicely in Windows :)

One thing that always gets on my nerves is that regular Emacs doesn't seem to work quite eight .. more to point, I can't seem to quit it using the usual Emacs sequence of C-x C-c. Instead I've been using Xemacs, and being careful to launch it to background so it doesn't mucker things up. Rather annoying, if the tinest of things.

Turns out you can just add a Windows env var "CYGWIN" with value "tty" to clue Cygwin into working correctly; Emacs can be exited and works as expected. Apparently the issue is Windows is capturing C-x and buggering things up.

(Perhaps this is a well known thing to the Cygwin hardcore, but I don't frequent the message boards or mailing lists for it.)

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