Cygwin release 1 of current mined version

[This file installs to /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/mined.README]

Mined is a text editor with extensive Unicode and CJK support.
See the generic README file or http://towo.net/mined/ for an overview.
This file mentions issues specific to the cygwin release of mined.


Character encoding support

Mined can edit Unicode text (encoded in UTF-8) or CJK encoded text in 
any terminal; proper display, however, depends on terminal support.


Terminal environment

Mined runs in any plain text terminal environment, especially:
* Windows DOS box (console window), which is automatically enabled to 
  run the "cygwin" terminal emulation when run with the cygwin1.dll library.
  Unicode display beyond an 8 bit character range is not available.
  Note that cygwin emulates the Windows "ANSI" character encoding 
  (codepage 1252, extension of ISO Latin-1) in a DOS box window 
  (unless reconfigured with the CYGWIN variable) instead of the IBM PC 
  character set that a DOS box runs by default. This may produce 
  unexpected appearance of non-ASCII characters when editing DOS 
  files; even editing the same file in the same DOS box alternatingly 
  with cygwin mined or djgpp mined will exhibit this change of 
  character interpretation.
  Mined detects, however, the environment setting 
  "CYGWIN=codepage:oem" and behaves accordingly.
* xterm running on an X server.
  UTF-8 display works fine if xterm is set up to provide it.
* rxvt running on an X server or stand-alone. The Unicode-enabled 
  recent release of rxvt does not yet work on cygwin, however.


Cygwin terminal problems

* [Fixed in cygwin 1.5.13]
  When a DOS box is scrolled down with its own scrollbar, or implicitly 
  by getting output, the cygwin mouse driver gets the wrong idea about 
  the position of the mouse pointer. Clicking the mouse in a program 
  is then next to useless as cygwin reports the wrong line position 
  to the program (relative to the scrolled-out memory, not the 
  visible screen as it should).
  See http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=512
  Fixed with patch http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-patches/2004-q4/msg00175.html
* [Fixed in cygwin 1.5.13]
  Colour handling by cygwin in a DOS box is unusual in some cases; 
  depending on the default colour setting of your shell environment, 
  reverse display (as used for mined menu headers and status line) 
  may be hard to read because cygwin does not reverse foreground 
  and background properly.
  See http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=514
  Fixed with patch http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-patches/2004-q4/msg00206.html
* Setting CYGWIN=tty is NOT recommended for mined. There is a bug 
  in the cygwin terminal handling of cursor position reports which 
  used to cause an error message on the first keyboard input.
  Although there is now a work-around for this in mined, CYGWIN=tty 
  is still not advised as there is no need for it.
  See http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=513


Cygwin X terminal problem

* When a larger xterm is started in Cygwin/X, the "tty" I/O driver 
  (running the communication between program and terminal) may obtain 
  the wrong idea about the size of the xterm. This affects all 
  screen-oriented programs. With xterm, mined now has a work-around 
  for this, adjusting the window height to what the tty thinks it is 
  (this does not work with rxvt).
  A general remedy is to resize the window once it has started; as a 
  work-around, I recommend to include the following in your .profile 
  or .bashrc:
	resize > /dev/null
  See http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=511


Compilation

To compile mined on cygwin, you need the usual basics (gcc, make) 
and a termcap library (termcap is fine, ncurses-devel can optionally 
replace it).
Go to the main directory of the mined distribution and invoke 'make' 
(there is a dummy configure script to conform to the usual cygwin 
production environment but it is not needed).
Then invoke 'make install' to install all files in their standard locations.


Package generation

Although I was told that cygwin source packages often generate a 
binary package when invoking 'make', I think this is very non-standard 
and it doesn't suit well in a generic make environment.
To generate cygwin binary and source packages into release/cygwin/, 
please invoke 'make cygwin'.


Binary release

The precompiled binary cygwin release of mined (download link see below) 
runs with only the cygwin1.dll library available, even without an 
installed cygwin system.


Contact

See http://towo.net/mined/ for documentation and download of the 
current mined version (including a precompiled cygwin binary version).
Send comments, feature requests, suggestions, bug reports etc. to:
mined@towo.net


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