Well I’m working in a Windows world yet again.  Of course this means I’m installing Cygwin so I have BASh and Perl and other Unix goodies at my fingertips.

I guess someone at Microsoft has been reading my blog because they decided to make 7 suck less than Vista.  Thanks, MS.

One of the interesting improvements is in the Taskbar.  You’ve probably read a lot about the replacing of my much-beloved Quick Launch with the new pinning features of the Taskbar.  I won’t bore you talking about it.

I did encounter a problem, however, in setting up Cygwin.  Since Cygwin is a binary file (a .bat file) Windows will not allow you to pin it to the Taskbar.  If you try to run the application and pin that, you will find that you have pinned a Windows Command Prompt instead of Cygwin (since Cygwin actually runs within cmd).  You have to create a special shortcut, run that shortcut, and finally pin that to your Taskbar.

There is one other modification you can make if you’d like, and that is to change the icon(the default icon is a green triangle surrounded by black and the default Taskbar is black so it rather disappears into a tiny green triangle).  You’ll have to hunt down your own icon (post it in the comments if you find a great one).  I just live with the tiny green triangle.

This is also an opportunity to change the name of the icon if you’re into that sort of thing (and again this is optional).  I called mine CygwinBash.

When you install Cygwin there will be a shortcut on your desktop.  You can use that shortcut or you can use any usual method to create another shortcut on your desktop.  Right-click on that shortcut and choose Properties.

Replace the Target with this: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c C:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat

You may now run this shortcut and pin the running application to your Taskbar.  If you’d like to change your icon first, then click the Change Icon button and locate your new icon (the default is probably at C:\cygwin\Cygwin.ico).  If you want to change your icon later you will have to begin again with a shortcut, follow these steps, and pin that new running application (with the altered icon) to the Taskbar.

I hope that helps you get your Shell on in Windows 7.

(Thanks to this article for some information.)