Posted: 23 April 2012
I just discovered (via
lifehacker)
the MinTTY alternative console that is part of
cygwin.
I'm a long-time Linux developer that has recently switched to Windows as
my primary desktop (the games are way better). Cygwin makes the existing
command line experience far better by letting me use bashisms, find,
grep and many of the other great command-line tools from Linux.
However, I found the default windows terminal console limiting, even when
its running bash.
The default terminal is stuck at a fixed 80-character width,
doesn't support cut+paste as I'm used to (or at all, as far as I can
tell).
Cygwin ships with an alternate terminal mintty.exe that provides much
more flexibility and customization. So I've got a wider terminal, better
colors, and working cut+paste support.
More details are available at the mintty project page. Specifically, the mintty tips wiki has a bunch of great suggestions for integrating mintty in Windows (shortcuts, command-prompt-here, etc).
Thanks, cygwin!