As I stated out in one of my last posts I am using cygwin a long time now and I am using it more and more within the last months. This is mainly caused by switching to git as my new favorite source code management tool and using maven for every Java project I am currently working on.

Today I fixed some small issues I had with cygwin that kept the true excellence of the bash command line, I was used to from my Linux systems, away from me.

One of these problems was that the Umlauts did not work in bash. I was able to fix this by adding the following lines to my ~/.inputrc

set meta-flag on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off

The second thing was that navigating with the cursor keys did not work in vim. This was fixed by creating a vimrc file using the sample by issuing the following command

cp /usr/share/vim/vim72/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc

Another benefit of the vimrc file was that syntax highlighting and colors were now enabled. I also had to make sure that the TERM environment variable was set to cygwin to get the cursor keys working. I did this by adding the following line to my ~/.profile file:

export TERM=cygwin

Now I am really happy with my console setup under Windows 7.