ZSH on Dos/Windows

ZSH on Dos/Windows

[Luciano ES]

	Hi, everyone. I have been using zsh for only a couple of weeks and
haven’t had much time to work with it. So I am a newbie. I've read a lot
of the manual, but have found it difficult to find the following info:

	- I am using zsh under Win/DOS. How can I launch zsh with an argument to
determine the startup directory? I thought I could run zsh -c "cd
c:/some/dir", but then the shell is not interactive. It runs and closes
right away. Calling zsh -ic "... didn't make any difference. My specific
need is to call zsh and open a command line session from another program,
with possibly a different working directory every time it is called. My
current workaround is to have that program set the desired working
directory as the value of the $ZSHSTARTDIR environment var *then* call zsh.
Then one line in .zshrc cd’s to $ZSHSTARTDIR. Well, it works, but I find
it a little clumsy and would like to know if there is another way.

	- BTW, running zsh not interactively often doesn't work because stupid DOS
changes all the path forward slashes that there may in the command argument
into backward slashes, even though the path is inside the quotes of an
argument. By the time the argument reaches zsh, zsh cannot find the path
with backward slashes. Does anyone know how to bypass that?

	- Is it at all possible to use colors in Win/DOS? I followed all those
instructions found on the manual, but I think they only apply to Unix. I
know colors are possible in DOS, I have seen ports of GNU tools that even
change the color of the background of the DOS shell, but I have been unable
to use any color with zsh.

	- Where can I find binaries for Windows?
	I see a new version has just been released and had a look-see at the FTP
site. There are no Windows binaries there. I am using a binary distribution
I got at this site <ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh>, $ZSH_VERSION tells
me it is version 3.0.5-nt-beta-0.75 and I find it a bit too old...

	Thank you very much for any input.

--
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Luciano ES (03-04-05 15:59 +0100)
> 	Hi, everyone. I have been using zsh for only a couple of weeks and
> haven’t had much time to work with it. So I am a newbie. I've read a lot
> of the manual, but have found it difficult to find the following info:
> 
> 	- I am using zsh under Win/DOS.

You are looking for Cygwin...

> [...]
> 	- Where can I find binaries for Windows?

You are looking for Cygwin...

> 	I see a new version has just been released and had a look-see at the FTP
> site. There are no Windows binaries there. I am using a binary distribution
> I got at this site <ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh>, $ZSH_VERSION tells
> me it is version 3.0.5-nt-beta-0.75 and I find it a bit too old...

The port is not maintained for two years ("I_no_longer_work_on_zsh"). 
You are looking for Cygwin...

thorsten@freki% echo $ZSH_VERSION
4.0.6

Thorsten
-- 
 Content-Type: text/explicit; charset=ISO-8859-666 (Parental Advisory)
 Content-Transfer-Warning: message contains innuendos not suited for
 children under the age of 18

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows

[Luciano ES]

>> 	- I am using zsh under Win/DOS.
>You are looking for Cygwin...

	- - Thanks for your helpful comment. But I'd rather not install 50 Mb of
run environment to use zsh. I certainly use other GNU tools, but a full
Cygwin install is not what I want.

>> 	- Where can I find binaries for Windows?
>You are looking for Cygwin...

	- - Thanks for your helpful comment. But I'd rather not install 50 Mb of
run environment to use zsh. I certainly use other GNU tools, but a full
Cygwin install is not what I want.

>> me it is version 3.0.5-nt-beta-0.75 and I find it a bit too old...
>The port is not maintained for two years ("I_no_longer_work_on_zsh"). 

	- - Yes, I saw that. But I've never compiled and built anything
successfully. I was hoping that someone here also used Windows and had
successfully built a newer version for Windows. Visiting the FTP site and
downloading the sources, I was dismayed to see build instructions for so
many platforms, even Mac, but no mention of Windows whatsoever! It's almost
like it was excluded intently. It was possible with that 3.0.5-nt-beta
version, so I can only wonder if any technical difficulty makes it
impossible for newer versions to be built in Windows too...

>You are looking for Cygwin...

	- - Thanks for your helpful comment. But I'd rather not install 50 Mb of
run environment to use zsh. I certainly use other GNU tools, but a full
Cygwin install is not what I want.

>thorsten@freki% echo $ZSH_VERSION
>4.0.6

	- - Congratulations!

-- 
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Luciano ES (03-04-05 18:53 +0100)
>>> 	- I am using zsh under Win/DOS.
>> You are looking for Cygwin...
> 
> 	- - Thanks for your helpful comment. But I'd rather not install 50 Mb of
> run environment to use zsh. I certainly use other GNU tools, but a full
> Cygwin install is not what I want.
> [Repeat two times]

Who said something about a "full install", hm? Trust uncle Thorsten - 
if all you want is zsh, you just have to install zsh (1.3 MB) and 
cygwin itself (1.1 MB). Oops, I forgot - you'd have to download 
"setup.exe" (180 KB).

Thorsten
-- 
 "A userguide is currently in preparation. It is intended to complement
 the manual, with explanations and hints on issues where the manual can
 be  cabbalistic,  hierographic,  or downright mystifying (for example,
 the word 'hierographic' does not exist)."  --  The Z Shell Manual

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (long)

[Luciano ES]

>Who said something about a "full install", hm? Trust uncle Thorsten - 
>if all you want is zsh, you just have to install zsh (1.3 MB) and 
>cygwin itself (1.1 MB). Oops, I forgot - you'd have to download 
>"setup.exe" (180 KB).

	OK, now you actually sound helpful... Let's see:

	That Cygwin "setup" (I hadn't used it in three years - time goes by really
fast) offers loads of Unix libraries, but I don't see a cygwin "program" in
that "way-narrower-than-my-screen-certainly-could-have-allowed-it-to-be"
setup select dialog. Or are you talking about the famous cygwin1.dll?

	OK, I followed your advice and installed Cygwin. Heck, I hadn't played
with Cygwin in three years, so I installed a lot more. Bash, textutils,
daemons, practically everything except graphics and devel. Playing with
Cygwin after so much time was fun, but I am not happy with the Cygwin ZSH.
Or with Cygwin, I don't know.
	When I run that 3.05 port of ZSH to Windows, you won't believe what
happens when I press the Home key. The cursor jumps to the beginning of the
line!!!! Have you ever seen that? And the best part: when I press the End
key, it jumps to the end!! Amazing!!!! OK, seriously, ZSH under Cygwin
imposes those stinky Emacs or Vi bindings, I don't know which one, I hate
both. So I put on my Unix user hat and did what a Unix user is supposed to
do: spend several hours reading documentation and try to learn how to do
something that should be absolutely natural in an ideal world. Why can't
Microsoft make solid and reliable software like the Nix world? And why
can't the Nix world make software for flesh and blood human beings? I
couldn't find the information I wanted. I discovered, though, that ZSH is
supposed to be able to listen to a key press and actually execute another.
So I spent another hour reading the same chapter over and over and trying
to make ZSH convert the Delete key into... the Delete command! No success.
I press Delete and get tildes. I press Home and get tildes. I press End and
get tildes. I press a tilde and get nothing! This is insane. No, this is a
prank : Home, End, Delete and accented characters work fine in Vi, in Edit
mode! Why can't the shell? I was about to blame Cygwin, but then I realized
that Home and End work fine in Cygwin Bash, only Delete produces tildes.
Even accented characters work in Bash. I am still reading ZSH's docs and
everything I try, key maps, bindings, all fails. Colors didn't work either.
They work in Bash, but not in ZSH. I followed the manual instructions, but
trying to colorize a prompt never worked, I get the color formatting
sequences in my prompt instead of actual colors. Bah, colors are not really
important. But key bindings are... I found a page on the Web with prompt
examples, but none of them produced colors succesfully. I also found a few
key binding examples, but they don't work either. I call bindkey -m and my
bindings are there at the end of the list, but they just don't work. Is
anyone in the list using color prompts in Cygwin and would you be so kind
to share your prompts with me? More importantly, can anyone make Home,
Delete and accented characters work with ZSH and Cygwin?


	And here is an interesting experiment, probably a "bug" report you don't
see every day...
	The native Windows Find utility is a little slow. It may take you almost a
minute to scan a large drive and find all files that match your query. So I
used the idea of indexing and built an indexing system. Whenever my
computer is idle for over 10 minutes, like when I stop for lunch, for
example, a script is launched, using ZSH to index my hard drives:
	zsh -c "print -l c:/**/* > c:/dirlist.txt"
	zsh -c "print -l d:/**/* > d:/dirlist.txt"
	etc.
	Then, when I want to find a file, I run a script that CATs and SEDs the
dirlist files and sends the output to my favorite text editor, with a
custom-made syntax highlighting scheme for file paths. The result is
instant, no query is completed in less than 6 seconds, they usually take
only 2. And I am talking about three partitions, more or less 4 Gb in all.
I also feel free to use actual regular expressions, I am not too found of
glob patterns.

	Before I continue, why use ZSH for that? I tried other things: find, ls,
dir and Windows programs too. They all either are too slow or produce
incomplete output. GNU find, for example, is slow. 10 seconds to scan the
smallest of my partitions. And if I use it to index the volumes, it skips
many files. ZSH seems to be the most reliable so far.

	OK, here is the experiment. As soon as I installed ZSH 4.0.6 with Cygwin,
I scanned and indexed the C: drive and it took over 2 minutes! ZSH 3.0.5
for Windows only took 15 seconds! I immediately thought: it must be Cygwin.
It added so many new files that reindexing now takes longer... but 8 times
as long??? So I reindexed the C: drive with 3.0.5 (Windows) again, 15
seconds. 4.0.6 (Cygwin) again, over two minutes. Could 4.0.6 be indexing
lots of files that 3.0.5 was missing? So it is even more accurate? Diff
them. No, exactly the same output. I repeated the test this morning, more
or less the same: 3.0.5 now is taking 20 seconds, and 4.0.6 is taking over
3 minutes!  Computers are fun.

	Sigh... maybe I'll just stick with that 3.0.5 Windows build. It doesn't
support accented characters or colors, but has none of the other problems
I've had with ZSH 4.0.6 and Cygwin...

	Thanks for listening, if anyone actually read this far.

-- 
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil

<-quote-> **************************************************
On 05/04/03 at 19:52, Thorsten Kampe wrote in 3K:
Assunto/Subject: Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows

>> 	- - Thanks for your helpful comment. But I'd rather not install 50 Mb
of
>> run environment to use zsh. I certainly use other GNU tools, but a full
>> Cygwin install is not what I want.
>> [Repeat two times, just like Uncle Thorsten]
>
>Who said something about a "full install", hm? Trust uncle Thorsten - 
>if all you want is zsh, you just have to install zsh (1.3 MB) and 
>cygwin itself (1.1 MB). Oops, I forgot - you'd have to download 
>"setup.exe" (180 KB).

********* END OF ORIGINAL MESSAGE *********</-quote->

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (long)

[Bart Schaefer]

On Apr 6, 12:48pm, Luciano ES wrote:
}
} When I run that 3.05 port of ZSH to Windows, you won't believe what
} happens when I press the Home key. The cursor jumps to the beginning
} of the line!!!! Have you ever seen that? And the best part: when I
} press the End key, it jumps to the end!! Amazing!!!! OK, seriously,
} ZSH under Cygwin imposes those stinky Emacs or Vi bindings, I don't
} know which one, I hate both.

Amol's 3.0.5 port actually carries around an implementation of a WinNT
console with it, and a special version of termcap that has built in to
it all the key bindings for that internal console terminal.  It doesn't
(as far as I can tell) actually change the default set of bindings for
zsh; that is, you ARE using the stinky Emacs bindings when you run that
3.0.5 port, it just happens that home/end/etc. are attached to the right
Emacs movement commands by virtue of the built-in terminal definition.

} So I spent another hour reading the same chapter over and over and
} trying to make ZSH convert the Delete key into... the Delete command!
} No success.

I don't suppose that zsh for cygwin comes with the "zkbd" function that
should be described in the "User Contributions" section of the manual,
under "Keyboard Definition"?

} Colors didn't work either. They work in Bash, but not in ZSH. I
} followed the manual instructions, but trying to colorize a prompt
} never worked, I get the color formatting sequences in my prompt
} instead of actual colors.

Zsh color support assumes an ANSI-compliant terminal.  I really don't
know what the cygwin console is emulating, terminal-wise.  The escapes
that zsh uses are in the "color" function, which should be somewhere
in the directories named in the $fpath array.

} I scanned and indexed the C: drive and it took over 2 minutes! ZSH
} 3.0.5 for Windows only took 15 seconds! I immediately thought: it
} must be Cygwin. It added so many new files that reindexing now takes
} longer...

You may have the right culprit but the wrong reason.  When compiled with
cygwin, zsh uses the cygwin library's emulations of the unix file and
directory access routines.  Amol's port has its own implementation of
the WinNT directory access routines.

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (long)

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Luciano ES (03-04-06 17:48 +0100)
>> Who said something about a "full install", hm? Trust uncle Thorsten - 
>> if all you want is zsh, you just have to install zsh (1.3 MB) and 
>> cygwin itself (1.1 MB). Oops, I forgot - you'd have to download 
>> "setup.exe" (180 KB).
> 
> 	OK, now you actually sound helpful...

Pardon me for not being useful in the first place.

> 	That Cygwin "setup" (I hadn't used it in three years - time goes by really
> fast) offers loads of Unix libraries, but I don't see a cygwin "program" in
> that "way-narrower-than-my-screen-certainly-could-have-allowed-it-to-be"
> setup select dialog. Or are you talking about the famous cygwin1.dll?

I am talking about "cygwin: The UNIX emulation engine" in the "Base" 
category in "Select packages".
 
> 	When I run that 3.05 port of ZSH to Windows, you won't believe what
> happens when I press the Home key. The cursor jumps to the beginning of the
> line!!!! Have you ever seen that? And the best part: when I press the End
> key, it jumps to the end!! Amazing!!!!

,--- * http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO-5.html
| People often complain 'my backspace key does not work', as if this key
| had  a  built-in  function 'delete previous character'. Unfortunately,
| all  this  key, or any key, does is producing a code, and one only can
| hope  that  the  kernel tty driver and all application programs can be
| configured  such  that  the  backspace  key  indeed does function as a
| 'delete previous character' key.
`---

> I discovered, though, that ZSH is supposed to be able to listen to a key
> press and actually execute another. So I spent another hour reading the
> same chapter over and over and trying to make ZSH convert the Delete key
> into... the Delete command! No success. I press Delete and get tildes.

bindkey "\e[3~" delete-char

> Colors didn't work either. They work in Bash, but not in ZSH. I followed the
> manual instructions, but trying to colorize a prompt never worked, I get
> the color formatting sequences in my prompt instead of actual colors.

The colours are more beautiful in Cygwin rxvt than in the standard 
Console window but they do "work".

> Is anyone in the list using color prompts in Cygwin and would you be so kind
> to share your prompts with me?

PS1='%n@%m%{'$'\e[1;36m%}%#%{'$'\e[m%} '
RPROMPT='%{'$'\e[1;34m%}%~%{'$'\e[m%} %h:%i'

> More importantly, can anyone make Home, Delete and accented characters work
> with ZSH and Cygwin?

,---
| ## BEGIN KEY BINDINGS
| # !?command <TAB>  complete from history  # Bang-history
| # !#        <TAB>  repeat command line
| #
| # ^A   beginning-of-line, ^E end-of-line
| # ^D   list completions, log out
| # ^K   kill-line, ^U kill-whole-line
| # ^R   history-incremental-search-backward, ^[P history-search-backward
| # ^W   backward-kill-word, ^[D kill-word
| # ^XU  undo, ^X^U undo
| #
| # ^[.  insert-last-word
| # ^[B  backward-word, ^[F forward-word
| # ^[H  run-help
| # ^[Q  push-line
| 
| bindkey "^Z"    accept-and-hold
| bindkey " "     magic-space  # also do history expansion on space
| bindkey "\e[3~" delete-char
| bindkey "\e[A"  up-line-or-search
| bindkey "\e[B"  down-line-or-search
| 
| ## Thorsten's own bindings
| ## rxvt
| # These are the same as below - captured with [Ctrl]+[V]
| #bindkey "^[Od"  backward-word
| #bindkey "^[[7~" beginning-of-line
| #bindkey "^[[8~" end-of-line
| #bindkey "^[Oc"  forward-word
| 
| # captured with "od -c"
| bindkey "\eOd"  backward-word
| bindkey "\e[7~" beginning-of-line
| bindkey "\e[8~" end-of-line
| bindkey "\eOc"  forward-word
| 
| ## Cygwin Console
| # Cygwin Console does not distinguish between [Ctrl]+[<|] and [<|]
| # respectively [Ctrl]+[|>] and [|>]
| if   [ "$TERM" = cygwin ]
| then bindkey "\e[1~" beginning-of-line
|      bindkey "\e[4~" end-of-line
| fi
| ## END KEY BINDINGS
`---

> 	And here is an interesting experiment, probably a "bug" report you don't
> see every day...
> 	The native Windows Find utility is a little slow. It may take you almost a
> minute to scan a large drive and find all files that match your query. So I
> used the idea of indexing and built an indexing system.

Use "locate" with "updatedb": "list files in databases that match a 
pattern"


Thorsten
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Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (short)

[Luciano ES]

	Thank you very much for all the info, Bart and uncle Thorsten.  ;-)
	Thorsten has actually given me a lot of info to look into, I'll be playing
with it later tonight. Meanwhile, I know I am supposed to read the manuals,
but there is something I would like to know and that a manual can't quite
give me in a straightforward manner: if I keep using that 3.0.5 NT version,
what really important features or improvements would I be missing? This
must not be an easy question for regular users either, but maybe somene
actually can aswer that...

	Thanks again,
-- 
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (short)

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Luciano ES (03-04-06 22:41 +0100)
> [...] there is something I would like to know and that a manual can't quite
> give me in a straightforward manner: if I keep using that 3.0.5 NT version,
> what really important features or improvements would I be missing?

http://zsh.sunsite.dk/releases.html

Thorsten
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Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (long)

[Bart Schaefer]

Having a few free minutes and a much larger disk recently installed
on my Windows box, I decided to fiddle with Cygwin a bit.

Aside:  The cygwin installer created C:\{bin,usr,lib}\ even though I
told it to use C:\Cygwin\ as root.  Those directories are all empty;
the installed files went correctly into C:\Cygwin\{bin,usr,lib,etc}\

First thing I noticed is that many of the zsh functions (in $fpath)
don't get very far if you haven't installed the fileutils and sh-utils
packages.  So I went back and installed them.

I also installed termcap and terminfo, (lack of) which may have some
bearing on the problems Luciano is having.

Second thing I noticed is that the PATH is not set up correctly if you
start zsh directly (as opposed to starting bash first and then running
zsh from there).  This is the fault of whoever built the zsh package
for cygwin, not of zsh itself.

Third thing: as usual, bash exports PS1, so the prompt looks stupid if
you start zsh from bash.

Fourth: Colored prompts work fine.  I did
	autoload -U promptinit
	promptinit
	prompt -p
and the only prompts that didn't display properly are the ones that need
perl to compute some of their components.  I'm now using "prompt bart"
(how surprising).

This makes me wonder how Luciano is starting up zsh.

Fifth: zkbd doesn't work, because "read -t" doesn't work and because each
new "read -k" discards typeahead.  I hacked it a bit (leaving it unusable
for anyone who doesn't know what I did, so I'm not going to post it) and
used it to generate the appended file.

It appears from Thorsten's message that there may be different sequences
when the shift or control keys are pressed, because I don't know what
generates e.g. "^[Od" (which Thorsten bound to backward-word).

Sixth:  The command `: **/*' from /cygdrive/c did indeed take several
minutes ... long enough that I went to do something else and didn't
notice exactly how long.

---- 8< ---- $HOME/.zkbd/cygwin-pc-cygwin ---- 8< ----
typeset -g -A key

key[F1]='^[[[A'
key[F2]='^[[[B'
key[F3]='^[[[C'
key[F4]='^[[[D'
key[F5]='^[[[E'
key[F6]='^[[17'
key[F7]='^[[18'
key[F8]='^[[19'
key[F9]='^[[20'
key[F10]='^[[21'
key[F11]='^[[23'
key[F12]='^[[24'
key[Backspace]='^H'
key[Insert]='^[[2~'
key[Home]='^[[1~'
key[PageUp]='^[[5~'
key[Delete]='^[[3~'
key[End]='^[[4~'
key[PageDown]='^[[6~'
key[Up]='^[[A'
key[Left]='^[[D'
key[Down]='^[[B'
key[Right]='^[[C'

bindkey "$key[Delete]" delete-char
bindkey "$key[Home]" beginning-of-line
bindkey "$key[End]" end-of-line
---- 8< ---- snip ---- 8< ----

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows (long)

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Bart Schaefer (03-04-06 22:45 +0100)
> Second thing I noticed is that the PATH is not set up correctly if you
> start zsh directly (as opposed to starting bash first and then running
> zsh from there).  This is the fault of whoever built the zsh package
> for cygwin, not of zsh itself.

"/etc/zprofile" takes care of that:
PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$PATH"

> It appears from Thorsten's message that there may be different sequences
> when the shift or control keys are pressed, because I don't know what
> generates e.g. "^[Od" (which Thorsten bound to backward-word).

This is [Ctrl]+[Cursor_left] in rxvt, but only rxvt generates 
different keycodes for [Ctrl] and [Shift], the native windows console 
doesn't.

Thorsten
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Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows - the end

[Luciano ES]

	Hello, everyone.
	If you don't remember me anymore, I turned to you last weekend to get help
on the use of ZSH under DOS/Windows. I moaned about not having a newer
build than 3.0.5 for Windows, and that I didn't want to use Cygwin. Well,
after this week, I think I am definitely converted into Cygwin. I've been
using it a lot and I am enjoying it. My only complaint, a big one, is that
Cygwin freezes too often when I call Bash or ZSH. The console window opens,
but the shell won't start. Then I have to Ctrl+Alt+Del and kill bash or zsh
and winoldap and try again. It happens in over half of all the times I
launch the shell, with or without rxvt. REALLY annoying. Apart from that,
things are working fine, including zsh.

	Thorsten and Bart: your tips on how to set up key bindings and colors
surely helped a lot. Some of Bart's bindings didn't work in rxvt, but
Thorsten's did. I am still learning how to set up these. Thank you very
much for your help. On the other hand, Thorsten, you told me to RTFM
several times, and that's not always the best answer. My question about the
changes from zsh 3.0.5 to the latest, was made totally on purpose. These
change logs most often don't mean anything to a newbie. Since I don't use
the program/language/whatever, I have no way to assess the impact of any
given change, changes made when I didn't even know the
program/language/whatever existed, so I cannot pinpoint the most relevant
changes in a long and strange list. I still don't know which of those
changes are the most relevant, but that doesn't matter anymore because I am
planning to stick with Cygwin. And, you see, there *was* something wrong
with cron in Cygwin… :-Para

	I also told you I was using zsh to index all files in my hard drive, that
it was pretty fast with zsh 3.0.5 Windows and *very slow* with zsh 4.0.6
Cygwin. More than one person suggested that I use updatdb and locate for
that. I didn't like it at all. Locate is pretty fast, but you have to
reindex the drives and update the database with updatdb, and that's *very
slow* too. I considered keeping zsh 3.0.5 Windows for that task alone, but
I replaced it completely with a Tcl script. zsh 3.0.5 Windows can scan my
drives in 20~30 seconds. Tcl can scan my drives in 20~30 seconds the first
time it is run, and if it's run again any time before a reboot, it does the
job in no more than 10 seconds. Yay! This language is always surprising me.
	Well, I guess this is it. Thank you for your attention and kind help.

	Best regards,
--
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil

Re: ZSH on Dos/Windows - the end

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Luciano ES (03-04-14 02:40 +0100)
> My only complaint, a big one, is that Cygwin freezes too often when I call
> Bash or ZSH. The console window opens, but the shell won't start. Then I
> have to Ctrl+Alt+Del and kill bash or zsh and winoldap and try again. It
> happens in over half of all the times I launch the shell, with or without
> rxvt. REALLY annoying.

Virus Scanner? Windows 98?
> On the other hand, Thorsten, you told me to RTFM several times, and that's
> not always the best answer.

Recommended readings:
"A workshop on Zsh"               by Larry P. Schrof
"A User's Guide to the Z-Shell"   by Peter Stephenson
"An Introduction  to the Z Shell" by Paul Falstad and of course
the "Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions"

> My question about the changes from zsh 3.0.5 to the latest, was made totally
> on purpose. These change logs most often don't mean anything to a newbie.
> Since I don't use the program/language/whatever, I have no way to assess
> the impact of any given change, changes made when I didn't even know the
> program/language/whatever existed, so I cannot pinpoint the most relevant
> changes in a long and strange list. I still don't know which of those
> changes are the most relevant, [...]

The completion system changed and is much more usable but your 
question was too general and the changes were too many to answer this 
sufficiently. The main difference between /your/ old zsh (Amol's zsh) 
and your new one is that cygwin's zsh is a vanilla/Unix zsh and Amol's 
was a "hacked" Windows one.

Thorsten
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