Symlinks under Cygwin

[ngaloppo]

What is the preferred way of using homeshick under windows? I find that when I run homeshick under Cygwin, it creates "cygwin" symlinks, which breaks terribly for non-Cygwin aware tools (e.g. Native Gvim).

I heard that there might be a (trick)[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18654162/enable-ntfs-symbolic-links-for-cygwin] to force Cygwin to use native NTFS links, but I haven't been able to make that work.

I'll take any suggestions :)

[andsens]

What is the preferred way of using homeshick under windows?

There is none :-)
I haven't tested homeshick on Windows and will not implement code for it, simply because supporting it will be quite a pain and the code would get too complicated to maintain (any new feature would need to have unit tests for linux, osx and windows behavior).
Sorry :-(

I heard that there might be a trick to force Cygwin to use native NTFS links, but I haven't been able to make that work.

You could try to fork homeshick? Just keep in mind that creating a symlink isn't the only problem. test -L will also have to work (and test should generally be able to follow a symlink).
I plan to refactor utils/ (#97) pretty soon, which would make forking easier because merging with upstream should produce less conflicts (splitting commands into separate files etc.).

[jjlin]

The issue of native Windows tools not recognizing Cygwin symlinks is unrelated to homeshick, and shouldn't be opened as an issue here. Perhaps try Superuser or some other StackExchange site.

There shouldn't be any particular issues with running homeshick under Cygwin, aside from the \ escaping issue. It would be nice to avoid breaking homeshick for Cygwin users, since there are many of them (myself included).

[andsens]

The issue of native Windows tools not recognizing Cygwin symlinks is unrelated to homeshick,

OK, fair enough. Is homeshick working on your system?

It would be nice to avoid breaking homeshick for Cygwin users, since there are many of them (myself included).

There is a long way from "accidentally working" to "tried and tested" :-)
Though I'll keep it in mind and try not to haphazardly create things that are known to break on windows (and I guess that includes the backslash as an escape character in #77)

[jjlin]

OK, fair enough. Is homeshick working on your system?

It does, at least the parts of homeshick that I use primarily (cd, check, link). It does seem to run a fair bit slower, possibly because of the higher overhead of starting new Cygwin processes, or Windows virus scanning, or whatever.

[ngaloppo]

I can confirm that homeshick is working on my Cygwin-on-Win7 system with CYGWIN=winsymlinks:nativestrict defined in the environment, and running with Administrator privileges.

[andsens]

Sweet :-)
Although I won't explicitly support Windows a note in the wiki might b helpful to others, I'll add that info.

[gdw2]

I just wanted to report that it homeschick seems to be working fairly well for me on Cygwin-on-Win7 using CYGWIN=winsymlinks:lnk which doesn't require admin privileges. The only windows program that I'm dealing with that needs to traverse the links is gvim.

[andsens]

Nice :-)
Maybe you could add a note to the FAQ?