Running GNOME Terminator in Cygwin

[Phasma Felis]

I've been looking for a Windows terminal emulator that's just like GNOME Terminator for a while (not to be confused with Jessies.org Terminator, thanks guys), and it finally occurred to me that I'm moderately familiar with Cygwin and I could probably just actually use Terminator.

Well, I discovered that Cygwin Ports includes Terminator, so I followed the instructions there to install it. It needs X, of course, so I installed Cygwin/X. Now I can almost get it to work. If I go to Start/All Programs/Cygwin-X/Xwin Server, I can run Terminator from there and it works, but I'd much rather have it appear to run "standalone" without the X root window hanging about. It says here that "XWin.exe -rootless" ought to accomplish that, but as far as I can tell, all that does is reel off a bunch of status messages and then lock up the Cygwin terminal I ran it in. Running "ps" from another Cygwin terminal shows that XWin is in fact running, but trying to start Terminator from there returns "You need to run terminator in an X environment. Make sure $DISPLAY is properly set". (It's not, but I don't know what it should be set to.)

I've been fiddling with this for hours and I'm tired of it. Is there a way to just have Terminator show up in my start menu and work as expected?

[beojan]

You could try running Xwin -rootless&

The & character in a unix console backgrounds the task, allowing you to use the terminal.

EDIT: Also, having looked at what gnome terminator is, you could try running some other X11 terminal emulator within a tiling window manager like i3 within an ordinary X window (root window).

[chridd]

Running "ps" from another Cygwin terminal shows that XWin is in fact running, but trying to start Terminator from there returns "You need to run terminator in an X environment. Make sure $DISPLAY is properly set". (It's not, but I don't know what it should be set to.)

From http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-f ... and-screen it looks like :0.0 might work. If not, you could try running it in a way that does work, typing echo $DISPLAY, and using that as the value of DISPLAY (assuming that it's always the same; I don't know whether it is). It might also be in some of the status messages.

startxwin might also be helpful; it looks like startxwin /path/to/Terminator -- -rootless (instead of opening Xwin and Terminator separately) will do what you want.

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of this, and I haven't used Cygwin recently. I'm mostly doing this from memory and from what I found on the internet just now. And educated guesses.)