cygwin & Play Framework / Typesafe Activator

I am currently playing around with using Play Framework on cygwin. I noticed that Typesafe Activator, which has replaced the play command in recent Play versions, ruins the mintty terminal of cygwin: you won’t see any echo of your keystrokes after activator returns.

A simple solution is to blindly type stty sane into the terminal, which will reset it. Another way is, to wrap the activator in a special cygwin-activator bash script:

#!/bin/bash
activator $@
R=$?
stty sane
exit $R

5 thoughts on “cygwin & Play Framework / Typesafe Activator”

  1. Thank you! I’m a cygwin+mintty user and just stumbled across this issue. I was sceptical that google would offer help, but your post popped up first and solved the problem. You should send the wrapper to the Typesafe guys.

  2. Thanks for posting this – but I have a question. How does one use this? Is it a script, do we put it in our .bash_rc or .bash_profile? How do we use this?

    I know it may seem very basic, but I’d appreciate some more how-to. Thanks!

  3. @Mike
    Add this as a new script to $HOME/bin/cygwin-activator, chmod +x $HOME/bin/cygwin-activator and then ensure, that your $HOME/bin is in your path. I normally have the following line in my .bashrc:

    export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

    Then you can use cygwin-activator anywhere you’d use activator.

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