This section needs a lot of work! Please help.
The recent Cygwin installation of ssh works only with a Cygwinized GNU Emacs. You can check it by typing M-x eshell, and starting ssh test.machine. The problem is evident if you see a message like this:
Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.
Older ssh versions of Cygwin are told to cooperate with tramp selecting sshx as the connection method. You can find information about setting up Cygwin in their FAQ at http://cygwin.com/faq/.
If you wish to use the
scpx connection method,
then you might have the problem that GNU Emacs calls
scp with a Windows
filename such as c:/foo. The Cygwin version of
scp does not know about
Windows filenames and interprets this as a remote filename on the
host c.
One possible workaround is to write a wrapper script for scp which converts the Windows filename to a Cygwinized filename.
If
you want to use either ssh based method on Windows, then you
might encounter problems with ssh-agent. Using this program, you can
avoid typing the pass-phrase every time you log in. However, if
you start GNU Emacs from a desktop shortcut, then the environment
variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK is not set and so GNU Emacs
and thus tramp and thus
ssh and
scp started from
tramp cannot communicate with
ssh-agent. It works
better to start GNU Emacs from the shell.
If anyone knows how to start ssh-agent under Windows in such a way that desktop shortcuts can profit, please holler. I don't really know anything at all about Windows...