➤ Cygwin ➤ Install and Use Cygwin

Install apt-cyg tool

There is a nice application called apt-cyg that can allow you to install applications (or packages) from the BASH shell. But you need to install it.

Start the BASH shell (i.e. run the "Cygwin.bat") program.
Run wget rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg
Run install apt-cyg /bin

At this point, you should be able to install a package from the command line. Let's find out.

Suppose you want to install the nano text editor. This editor appears on most Linux distros.
Type apt-cyg searchall nano to see all the packages that have some relation to nano.
You can see that nano appears in the list.
Type nano at the terminal.
If something loads up, then you know it's already installed. Hit CTRL-X to quit.
Otherwise, you could just type apt-cyg install nano
Type nano myfile.txt at the terminal.
Enter some text, like "Once upon a time..."
Type CTRL-X, Y, ENTER to save this file.
You should be out of the editor and back to the terminal.
Type ls -la. You should see something like this below with myfile.txt in the list.
You just created a file. Type nano myfile.txt to edit it again if you want to make changes and save it.

total 1579855
drwxr-xr-x 1 rob None          0 Sep  5 16:44 .
drwxrwxrwt 1 rob None          0 Sep  5 11:42 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rob None       1494 Aug 30  2022 .bash_profile
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rob None       5645 Aug 30  2022 .bashrc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rob None       1919 Aug 30  2022 .inputrc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rob None       1236 Aug 30  2022 .profile
-rw------- 1 rob None          7 Sep  5 12:33 .python_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 rob None        215 Sep  5 13:26 .wget-hsts
-rw-r--r-- 1 rob None      13765 Sep  5 13:26 apt-cyg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rob None         17 Sep  5 16:44 myfile.txt

Type cat myfile.txt in the terminal to list out the contents of the file.