[ale] Free X11 server for Win32

[Jesse Guardiani]

You folks might be interested in this:

Have you ever wanted to open up a PuTTY session to a linux server,
start up VIM within that session, highlight a bunch of text using 'v'
or 'V' (visual, aka highlight), then press 'y' (yank, aka copy) and
have that text appear in your Windows clipboard so you can paste it
somewhere else (i.e. an email or another VIM session)?

It's possible. In the past I've used Cygwin to make it happen, but
Cygwin is a major pain to install and maintain, so I've never
recommended it to others. However, today I just discovered that
there's a better solution. Download, install, and run this X11
server (it's a simple automated install):
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming
After executing Xming, you'll see a black X with a red swoosh
around it in your task tray. That means the X11 server is running. Yay.

Next, change your putty settings for a given host to allow X11
forwarding by clicking the following in the left hand pane of the
PuTTY Configuration window:
    Connection -> SSH -> X11
Then, in the right hand pane, check the box next to:
    Enable X11 Forwarding
Then, in the left hand pane, click:
    Session
And finally in the right hand pane click:
    Save

Now open the connection you've just modified and run vim on a text
file. You should now be able to highlight the entire file (gg,V,G) and
copy it to your Win32 clipboard (y). Then you can paste the text as
usual into any win32 application. Not only that, but you can also run
*graphical* X11 applications over your PuTTY session. For example, run
the command `gvim` from a staging server prompt and see what happens.

Hope you find this information useful. I think it'll really save you a
lot of time if you ever use SSH and vim for remote development or
systems administration from a win32 machine.



-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at guardiani.us