Configuring Console2 with Cygwin

When using Windows, Console2 does a great job of managing my console windows, but it’s not intuitive how to configure it with Cygwin (my console of choice).  It’s not that hard to simply get Cygwin to open in Console2, but it can be tricky to get it open to a startup directory.

Here are the steps to get Console2 to open to a specific startup directory:

1. Launch Console2
2. Open settings through Edit > Settings
3. Click tabs from the tree on the left
4. Click the ‘Add’ button to add a new tab
5. Set the title to ‘Cygwin’ (or another appropriate name)
6. In the ‘Shell’ field put: 

C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "cd /cygdrive/c/Users/<username>/<path>/; exec /bin/bash"

C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "cd /cygdrive/c/Users/<username>/<path>/; exec /bin/bash"

• Replace username with your login name, and the path with the path you want to use relative your home directory.  This can also be used to start in other paths on the system.
• This launched cygwin with the command to change the path and then launches bash again so the console window will stay open.
• You don’t have to put anything in ‘Startup dir’
7. You should be set to open Cygwin tabs to a specific directory in Console2.

Feel free to do other customizations to the console, I like to make each console have a different color so it’s easy to tell which type of console I’m looking at very quickly.