The Cygwin installer creates a shortcut for mintty in the Windows start menu.' If you use CygWin, the default terminal (DOS console) will give you the following problems: Resizing the window rarely works Termcap-based apps over ssh don't work Lame scrolling Can't select text on multiple lines it makes a box instead of wrapping the selection AdewaleOshineye has this excellent recommendation, which fixes all of the above: Make sure rxvt is part of your Cygwin install, and update your C:\cygwin\cygwin.bat to this: off It can be downloaded from here or it can be installed through Cygwin's setup.exe program, where it can be found in the Shells category. Better Cygwin Terminalmintty is an option - 'Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin and Cygwin derivatives such as MSYS.
