How to install Byobu on Cygwin

Byobu is a user friendly terminal multiplexer built around tmux.

There is no byobu package in Cygwin, but installing it from source is easy:

• Install tmux and make using the Cygwin package installer.

• Download the latest release of Byobu from here and unzip it.

• Configure by providing it the directory where you want it to be installed and then make install it:

$ ./configure --prefix="$HOME/installs/byobu"
$ make
$ make install

• Add the installed bin directory to your PATH environment variable at the shell or permanently in your bashrc:

$ export PATH="$HOME/installs/byobu/bin:$PATH"

You can now run byobu at the shell. You will notice that there will be some errors when it looks for Linux programs that are either not installed or not available on Cygwin. Also, the configuration user interface does not appear since that needs python-newt which is not available for Cygwin. Some of the function key combinations might also not work cause it is Windows.

Tried with: Byobu 5.125 and Cygwin 2.10