Tramp & Cygwin (was: Emacs unconditionally loads tramp.el)

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> writes:

> "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
>
>> The thing I find annoying is I've never been able to get it to work on MS
>> Windows - I need to be able to get to a GNU/Linux box from Emacs on Windows,
>> but I was never able to log in with Tramp. Kai Grossjohann spent some time
>> trying to help me get it to work over a year ago, but we never succeeded in
>> understanding the problem. I gave up. Perhaps I'll try again after the
>> release comes out....
>
> There are "plink" methods for working with PuTTY's command-line
> terminal. I think Cygwin's ssh port expects to be run from an
> interactive Cygwin bash shell, so doesn't work well under Emacs.

I've spent several weeks trying to make Tramp running with Cygwin's
ssh. Finally I gave up, because I didn't find a way to cooperate with
their pseudo tty. Starting Cygwin's bash first, and afterwards ssh
from there, doesn't work either, IIRC.

A "cygwinized Emacs", i.e. built under Cygwin, doesn't suffer from this
problem.

Another workaround is ssh-agent, because the only hurdle to pass is
the interactive passphrase handover to the shell starting ssh.

Note that I'm neither an expert in MS Windows nor in Cygwin, just a
very occasional user. Some people tried to help, also w/o success.

Because this belongs to the top list of "Tramp's annoyances", I would
appreciate any new idea what to do.

Best regards, Michael.