alternatives to Gnu screen under Cygwin

Question

Are there any terminal multiplexers for Cygwin/Windows other than Gnu's screen?

I know of 2 alternatives to the Gnu's screen application: Byobu and TMux. However, neither of these run under Windows using Cygwin.

Answer 1

Indeed neither byobu nor tmux are available as Cygwin packages, but you could try building them from source. Lots of programs do build without Cygwin-specific patches these days.

(Btw, byobu actually is Screen, but with a fancy default configuration.)

Answer 2

It looks like the current byobu version (5.18) works out of the box on cygwin.

To install it, I did the following:

1. download byobu from https://launchpad.net/byobu
2. tar xzpf byobu-* && cd byobu-*
3. install make and screen in cygwin
4. ./configure && make && make install

and byobu is working...

Answer 3

I would like to update this with a note that I have successfully installed byobu under Cygwin 1.7.9 - although I may have implicitly installed other dependencies, I was able to download the source, compile, and install with absolutely zero issue. I received the same route file note but it did not stop it from loading- the python error will though

Answer 4

I installed the cygwin gnu screen package.

Then I downloaded the latest byobu tarball and installed it following it's readme-file. But after installation I could not run it, I gave up at this point:

Administrator@ntmachine ~
$ byobu
/bin/byobu/lib/byobu/include/shutil: line 292: /proc/net/route: No such file or
directory
/usr/bin/env: python: No such file or directory

It would be easy to meet the python requirement in the last line, but I believe the /proc/net/route issue would be difficult.

So I will use screen now on cygwin instead of byobu.

There does not seem to be a tmux package. And as camperdave pointed out, it could be not buildable for cygwin.

Answer 5

As far as I know, tmux isn't buildable for Cygwin - something to do with Unix Domain sockets not working right in that environment. Sad, I know.