The default shell for Cygwin uses a DOS command shell, which has limited usefulness. To enhance the console experience, here are some customizations. To enhance the shell prompt, use the Cygwin installer to install 'rxvt'.
The icon that the Cygwin installer puts on your desktop has a link to a start up file. I've put the following
into my startup file in order to start up rxvt as the default terminal. As you see, I've also installed 'nano' and
set it as the default editor.
@echo off
C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin
set EDITOR=nano
set VISUAL=nano
set CYGWIN=codepage:oem tty binmode title
rxvt -fg green -fn "Lucida Console-12" -geometry 80x50 -sl 1000 -sb -e bash --login -i
The installer may or may not place a few other relevant files in your home drive: .bash_profile, .bashrc, and
.inputrc. These can be found in /etc/skel and should be copied to your home directory. They can then be edited to
taste.
For copying text in the rxvt terminal window, simply highlight the text while holding the left mouse button. It
will be automatically copied to the clipboard once the mouse button is released. To paste the text, hold the shift
key while pressing the left mouse button. This is slightly different from putty, which does not require the shift
key to be held. To select a range of words you can double click on the first word, then set the mouse cursor to
the
right of the last word or letter you want copied, and right-click.
Here is a Cygwin Prompt Here method.
Use cygwin to run crontab jobs.
The following can be added to .bashrc to pipe any command to less (so ls):
#A function to pipe any command to less:
function so {
eval "$@" |less -I~
}
A Cygwin FAQ has some useful comments regarding
mkpasswd, Octave, enhanced Bash profiles, X, and csh.