Installing TeXmacs under Cygwin

There are basically two methods to get TeXmacs working under Cygwin:

  1. Installation of the official Cygwin package (recommended). Follow these Instructions.

  2. Download, compile and install TeXmacs manually. Follow the Instructions below, but note that the information about dependent packages is outdated; See the file setup.hint (from the abovementioned package) for the latest information.


You may use TeXmacs on a Windows platform via Cygwin. Cygwin is a Unix distribution which can be used directly under Windows. In order to install TeXmacs, you should therefore first install Cygwin and next TeXmacs. This page describes how to do this by compiling TeXmacs from source.

1.Install Cygwin with setup.exe

The last version of Cygwin can be installed from http://www.cygwin.com as follows:

  1. Download setup.exe and execute it.

  2. Choose for instance to install via internet. Indicate the installation directory (e.g. C:\cygwin). If needed, indicate a proxy and the corresponding port. Also indicate a directory for the installation files (e.g. C:\Cygwin-installation). It can take a long time (30 min) to download everything.

  3. It is probably simplest to perform a complete installation. For each non selected package, you may select it by click on Default so that it becomes Install. However, you should not install the ghostscript package (you should install ghostscript-base and ghostscript-x11), by selecting Skip for this package.

    If, for some reason, you do not want to perform a complete installation, then you should make sure that you install at least the following packages: gcc, make, tetex, tetex-devel, texmf, XFree86-base, XFree86-prog, ghostscript-x11 and all Guile packages (guile, guile-devel, guile-doc, libguile12 and libguile14). You probably also want a decent window manager like openbox or WindowMaker.

  4. Install.

  5. Put c:\cygwin at the start of the PATH environment variable and 127.0.0.1:0.0 for DISPLAY in the menu Start->Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environment variables.

  6. In order to test your installation, you may

    • Launch Cygwin from your desktop using the link.

    • In the Cygwin window, launch the X server using XWin& and the window manager using fvwm2&.

    • In the X window, try launching an Xterm using the popup menu when pressing the right-hand button.

2.Download the TeXmacs distribution

Download the latest version (3.8 Mb) of the source code. You may for instance save the distribution in C:\tmp. The name of the file with the distribution is of the form TeXmacs-[source version]-src.tar.gz, where [source version] is the corresponding version. If you do not have ftp access, then you might wish to download from the web.

3.Compile TeXmacs

Launch an Xterm as explained at the end of step 1 and, assuming that you saved the TeXmacs distribution in C:\tmp, type the following commands in your Xterm:

    cd c:/tmp
    tar -zxvf TeXmacs-[source version]-src.tar.gz
    cd TeXmacs-[source version]-src
    ./configure
    make
    make install

You should now be able to run TeXmacs using

    texmacs &

4.Finishing touches