How to make Cygwin shortcut stick to Windows 7 dock

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?

Frank Krueger

Posted 2009-10-21T01:09:48.783

Reputation: 976

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

– Arjan – 2009-10-21T08:36:42.370

Answers

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.

Drakia

Posted 2009-10-21T01:09:48.783

Reputation: 635

Does cygwin acutally start when you run it. Do you already have a "Command Line" on your Dock? Are you using a version > beta? – Frank Krueger – 2009-10-22T02:15:54.200

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 – 2009-10-22T05:29:21.460

Works great now. Very funny, but you're right. This hand-created shortcut works fine. – Frank Krueger – 2009-10-22T23:13:12.237

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.

ak2

Posted 2009-10-21T01:09:48.783

Reputation: 86

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

musa

Posted 2009-10-21T01:09:48.783

Reputation: 501

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.

Jared Harley

Posted 2009-10-21T01:09:48.783

Reputation: 11 692