Cygwin/X

I have just opened my blog, and I am very excited about this. So here comes the second post.

Last week, my brother brought me a laptop from Canada: Asus U36JC. The laptop is awesome: intel i5 processor, one usb3.0 port, total weight is 1.6kg, long battery life -- I am very happy. After using my EeePC for last 2 years, the 13.3'' screen looks like a 50'' plasma in a hall.

But the laptop comes with Windows 7. Last time I used MS Windows in my daily life, was more than 3 years ago. It was Windows XP, and it was disgusting. In that time a migration from Windows XP to Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) was very popular (it is right at least for the forums I used to visit). So I decided to be Ъ as well and to migrate to Linux.

During the short period of using Linux I got used to all this Unix-utilities and I can't imagine now a life without shell, grep and gvim. Fortunately, I am not alone, and some people who faced this problem solved it: Cygwin is an open-source project that provides an easy way to port *nix-utilities to Windows platform. If you are interested, visit the site, the installation is pretty easy and straightforward.

One of the coolest features of Cygwin is Cygwin/X. That is, it's an open-source X Server port for Windows. The problem is when I want to  run some X app I need, first, to make sure the X Server is already running. That's very annoying. So I googled, and one of the first results I got was this one. It's short description is:
use Cygwin's run command, whose only purpose is to run other programs in background; add "<path-to-cygwin>\bin\run.exe -p /usr/X11R6/bin XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error" to your Startup group and enjoy!

That's exactly what I wanted. But now I want more: on EeePC I was using wmii window manager. It's a nice lightweight tiled WM, excluding its developer team philosophy break-config-compatibility-on-each-release. And I got used to its shortcuts, one of which is Alt+<Enter> to open the xterm (urxvt in my case). So the next goal is to find out an easy way to make it.