Cygwin shell add context menu item

Question

There's this question on SO:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9637601/open-cygwin-at-a-specific-folder

I want to do something opposite. When using terminal I want to right click and have context menu item "Open Explorer here" to open regular Windows explorer window with current location (pwd). Is there a way to add context menu item to cygwin terminal?

Answer 1

It turns out you can use Ctrl + click on a path in mintty to do exactly that.

Answer 2

Ctrl + click doesn't work with my mintty, maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Anyway, I've learned some trick from Pragmatistic Guy and made small modification to accomplish what you want more elegently. I'll copy his solution here and all credits belongs to him.

• To ensure this script only run under cygwin, you may add platform detection commands to your ~/.bashrc:

  if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "linux-gnu" ]]; then
      echo "Linux-gnu environment detected."
  elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "cygwin" ]]; then
      echo "Cygwin environment detected."
      if [ -f "${HOME}/.bashrc.cygwin" ]; then
          source "${HOME}/.bashrc.cygwin"
      fi
  else
      echo "Unknown Platform"
  fi
  

• Now add following script to ~/.bashrc.cygwin:

  function xpl {
       if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
           XPATH=.   # Open current directory in default
       else
           XPATH=$1
           XPATH="$(cygpath -C ANSI -w "$XPATH")";
       fi
       explorer $XPATH
   }
  

• You can now call xpl dir_name_or_file_name to make windows open directory/file with default program.

• explorer.exe won't block your shell input, isn't that perfect?