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I have recently installed Cygwin on a Windows 7 beta machine. Everything works great, except one little annoyance:

The Cygwin shortcut (Start->All Programs->Cygwin->Cygwin Bash Shell) cannot be pinned to the Start menu. My guess as to why is that I already have a "Console" window pinned to the start menu. My guess is that Windows sees that the two EXEs are the same and won't let me pin it.

This would be fine except I cannot pin the window to the Dock either. While Cygwin is running, WIndows interprets it as just a Command Window and won't let me pin it either.

How do you pin the Cygwin shortcut to the dock?

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  • 1
    Not what you're asking, but maybe a "Cygwin here" context menu in Windows Explorer is even better. See the screenshot at software.ellerton.net/cygwin (though you might want to search Google if a Windows 7 specific solution exists).
    – Arjan
    Oct 21, 2009 at 8:36

4 Answers 4

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I just created a shortcut to "E:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i" on my desktop, ran that, and then pinned the resultant process to the task bar, and it seems to have worked.

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  • Does cygwin acutally start when you run it. Do you already have a "Command Line" on your Dock? Are you using a version > beta? Oct 22, 2009 at 2:15
  • Yes, it runs, yes, there was already a "Command Line" on the dock, and it's Win7 RTM. Is this method not working for you?
    – Drakia
    Oct 22, 2009 at 5:29
  • Works great now. Very funny, but you're right. This hand-created shortcut works fine. Oct 22, 2009 at 23:13
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You could use mintty, which aside from being easily pinnable has lots of other advantages over the console, e.g. free resizing and standard copy&paste. To be found under 'Shells' in Cygwin's setup.exe.

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You should be able to make a shortcut on the desktop for your program, and then drag THAT shortcut to the taskbar.

Edit: After playing around, I was seeing the same issue.

However:

Windows 7 Center provides us with a way to "pin any item to the taskbar" using a registry hack.

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Prepending cmd /c to the Target of of the link also did it.

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