Is it possible to get gVim to execute external commands in cygwin by default?

Question

Is it possible to get gVim (on windows) to execute external commands in cygwin by default? i.e. !ps will open a cygwin terminal showing the currenty running processes?

Answer 1

First you need to tell Vim to run the bash program instead of cmd.exe, and bash needs to run as a login shell so that it will read the profile/login scripts and set up the environment (PATH, etc) properly.

You also need to change the setting that introduces command-line options to the shell:

:set shell=C:\Cygwin\bin\bash.exe\ -login
:set shellcmdflag=-c

If your cygwin commands require arguments, you should probably also

:set shellquote=\"

to ensure that the whole command gets wrapped up in quotes properly, otherwise the shell will only get the first word and ignore the rest.