zsh with Cygwin

Question

How can I configure zsh to be the default shell under Cygwin?

Answer 1

Unless you're using cygwin as a multiuser environment (in which case use chsh as you would under a standard environment.)

Otherwise, you just change cygwin.bat to run zsh -l -i instead of bash --login -i and it will run as a login shell.  

Of course, if you want to run multiple shells from startup, just create a set of .bat files to load different shells. (sh, ksh, csh, fish etc)

Update...

I felt I should update this to provide info on doing this without chsh but still doing it on the Unix end. Edit the /etc/passwd file and replace occurrences of /bin/bash with /bin/zsh. (This is effectively what chsh would do, but this way you'd do it for all users in one go.)

Answer 2

This details how to setup csh as the default shell, but I think it should at least point you in the right direction.