Installing Cygwin

To begin the installation process, navigate to https://cygwin.com/install.html and download either setup-x86_64.exe or setup-x86.exe depending on the version of Windows you're using (64 bit or 32 bit respectively).

If you're not sure whether your system is 32 bit or 64 bit, you can open Control Panel |  System and Security |  System, and look at System type. For example, my Windows machine shows System type: 64-bit Operating System, x64-based processor.
Open the executable file, and you will be greeted by the following Cygwin installation window:

Hit Next > a few times, proceeding with the default settings:

  • Download source: Install from Internet
  • Root directory: C:\cygwin64 (or a recommended default)
  • Install for: all users
  • Local package directory: C:\Downloads (or a recommended default)
  • Internet connection: Use System Proxy Settings
  • Download site: http://cygwin.mirror.constant.com (or any available option)

After this, you will be greeted with the Select Packages screen. Here, we want to select the vim, gvim, and vim-doc packages. The easiest way to do this is to type vim in a search box, expand the All |Editors category, and click on the arrow-looking icons next to the desired packages, as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

The preceding screenshot shows version 8.0.1567-1. This is the only version available at the moment of writing this book, November 2018. The primary difference is the absence of the :terminal command (see Chapter 5, Build, Test, and Execute) in Vim 8.0 vs 8.1.

You may want to install curl from under the Net category, and git from under the Devel category, as we'll be using both in chapter 3. It might also be helpful to install dos2unix from under the Utils category, which is a utility used for converting Windows-style line endings to Linux-style line endings (something you might run into once in a while).

Hit Next > two more times to proceed, which will begin the installation. Installation will take some time, and now would be a great moment to prematurely congratulate yourself with some coffee!

You might get a few post-install script errors, which you can safely dismiss (unless you see any errors related to Vim—then Google is your friend: search for an error text and try to find a solution).

Hit Next > a few more times, proceeding with the defaults:

  • Create icon on Desktop
  • Add icon to Start Menu

Congratulations, you now have Cygwin installed with Vim!

If you ever need to install additional packages in Cygwin, just rerun the installer while selecting the packages you want.
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