A Report from the Sewer Hole: Cygwin, JLine, rxvt, and the Scala REPL

I have students running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and I like to encourage students to choose whatever platform makes them most productive. But I also like to be able to give out one set of instructions, grading scripts, etc. to everyone. Fortunately, bash is available everywhere, even on Windows, in the form of Cygwin. Of course, some students groan because Cygwin can be a pain, with the DOS vs. Unix paths, separators, and line endings. But what's the alternative? To only learn Windows stuff? To learn two sets of commands for everything? I think it is much better to learn one shell language and get good at it. That's just by way of background, to explain my interest in Cygwin. Today, I want to write down what I found out about running the Scala REPL from Cygwin, so that I have a record for the next time I have to go down the Windows sewer hole. The Scala REPL uses the JLine library for reading user input. This enables history recall, editing of the current line, and tab completion. Lots of people have trouble with JLine and Cygwin and report various workarounds, and not just with Scala. The Jython and Clojure REPL have similar issues. 1. JLine and Cygwin/rxvt The key observation is that JLine works (kind of—see below) inside a cmd window (the one with the ridiculous mechanism for copy/paste) and its saner variants such as Console. But it does not work with rxvt. rxvt is popular with Cygwin users because copy/pas...

Date: November, 24 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/11/24/report-sewer-hole-cygwin-jline-rxvt-and-scala-repl

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