23. November 2011

Mintty – resizable terminal for Windows

Update 4.11. 2012: Mintty/Cygwin Termina; has also support for transparency.

Update 31.12. 2011: new version of Mintty (see discussion).

Cygwin is great tool for Windows.

E.g. You can create shell script to access windows share via //computer/share_name. This saves a lot of time when you’re domain admin and you need to maintain many computers.

The only BIG drawback of Cygwin for Windows was terminal window. When you work on Mac or Linux you can resize terminal window as you need. Terminal (CMD) for Windows sucks. In default installation you can resize just in one direction. The other option would be to mix Cygwin with PowerShell, but then many things are not working at all.

Good news! Great news! There is new terminal window in Cygwin 1.7.x. It’s application mintty.

Installer will create link to this app with name Cygwin Terminal. It will launch mintty process and you can resize window without problem.

It works fantastic! After so many yeaars it is now possible to use full power of Windows and Linux together in one bundle. (Yes, I know about other terminals like rxvt or X-based stuff, but it required always some extra steps).

Some computers were complaining that /Cygwin-Terminal.ico was not found and I was not able to launch terminal. Solution was easy. Right click on launcher icon and remove icon parameters from Target. The result target command should look like: C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe

Hooray! BIG thank you goes to authors of mintty for Windows.

Follow Mintty T.

20. June 2011

ImageMagick – quick way how to resize and auto-orient photo

ImageMagick is quite handy tool for batch image conversion from command line.

Let’s say that there are 50 photos in one directory. We want to fix orientation based on Exif info and shrink images to 50% of size. We can achieve it by this shell command:

for i in *.jpg; do convert -auto-orient "$i" -resize 50% "$i"; done

If you need version for Windows then I recommend installing Cygwin.