What's the best way to run a 256 color Cygwin terminal in ConEmu?

[Philip Daniels]

Hi,

The "normal" way of starting a Cygwin bash prompt in ConEmu is to setup a task such as

    C:\cygwin64\bin\bash --login -i

The problem with this is that the terminal type is funny: $TERM is "cygwin" which seems to be an 8 color terminal? and is unknown to most boxes over ssh.

Anyways, Cygwin comes with mintty, which you can start in ConEmu like this:

    C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -

This gives you a pukka 256 color console. You can set the terminal type to xterm-256color, and then palette customizations such as solarized, console vim and colors over ssh all work correctly.

My question is, in the last form, am I now running a console inside a console? I suspect I am, because it uses Mintty's cursor rather than ConEmu's cursor. Maybe it is a bit inefficient, though it does seem to work well (heaven knows how, but it does :-) And if my guess is correct, has anybody figured out a way to run a Cygwin bash shell directly within ConEmu in 256-color mode?

--

Phil