[racket] XREPL on Windows

> Apologies in advance: I'm talking about something I know *almost* nothing about, but it appears that these days, "git" for windows ships with something that looks like a pretty complete "bash". Is this a viable alternative to cygwin, or are there a whole bunch of pieces that I don't know about?

It's a Bash shell with a reasonable selection of core utilities, but
not nearly as much as is available with Cygwin.  Also IIUC FWIW it's
based on MinGW, not cygwin.

In my case Git Bash was the gateway drug. Later I installed cygwin and
used its git build. I also used MinTTY.

Using either cygwin and MinGW, readline "just worked" for me.

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:54 AM, John Clements
<clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
>
> On May 6, 2012, at 10:55 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
>> On November 12th 2011, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>>>
>>> (Yeah, but like I said I have no experience with trying to get
>>> anything out of readline on windows.  (At least not outside of a
>>> cygwin terminal.))
>>
>> Xrepl still just avoids using readline on windows -- and it seems that
>> the situation in cygwin is now a little worse...  The thing is that it
>> now ships with its own terminal application which Racket doesn't
>> recognize as a terminal (in the sense of `terminal-port?').  But more
>> than that, the dll is in a weird place and has a weird name: it's in
>> "/bin/cygreadline7.dll".
>>
>> The thing that makes it worse is that this terminal implementation
>> suffers from the common problem that plagued old terminals: the arrow
>> keys send escape codes to the application, but when these escapes are
>> printed the cursor moves to where you'd expect it to move.  (For
>> example, run "cat" and then enter "foo<UP>bar<RET>" and see what
>> happens...)
>>
>> So my conclusion, for now, is that I don't see any way to make it
>> work, so I think that it's hopeless to get readline to work there.
>> Given that this looks like a common problem, I hope that things will
>> improve in a more transparent way.
>
> Apologies in advance: I'm talking about something I know *almost* nothing about, but it appears that these days, "git" for windows ships with something that looks like a pretty complete "bash". Is this a viable alternative to cygwin, or are there a whole bunch of pieces that I don't know about?
>
> Ob google: this stack overflow thread corroborates my opinion, I believe:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/783906/git-under-windows-msys-or-cygwin
>
> John
>
>
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