Disregard this, use mintty - A decent native Windows shell

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CMD.EXE sucks and the Windows-native replacements are all rubbish. What to do? Install Cygwin with RXVT. It doesn't have tabs, but everything else about it is fine. It doesn't require an X server. You'll have two options: rxvt-x and rxvt-native. Both work. To set the font of rxvt-x, edit values in .Xdefaults (below). To set the font of rxvt-native, edit the shortcut itself. If you're on Windows 7 and want to use pinning, rxvt-native is a better choice, since rxvt-x runs through a wrapper that confuses the Windows 7 pinning system.

To set your shell to bash, make an environment variable "SHELL" equal to "bash".

To configure RXVT, create a ~/.Xdefaults file populated with the material below.

Also, you may wish to add the following to your .bashrc:

if [ "$TERM" == "rxvt-cygwin" ] ; then export TERM=xterm ; fi
if [ "$TERM" == "rxvt-cygwin-native" ] ; then export TERM=xterm ; fi

This will change the value of the TERM environment value to "xterm" instead of "rxvt-cygwin" when using rxvt, which is useful since most servers have never heard of "rxvt-cygwin" and would otherwise assume you have a dumb terminal.

Content of ~/.Xdefaults:

! Save this file as ~/.Xdefaults and start a term without any options to
! see what it does.

! Use ! for comments (if you don't like a certain setting)

! The `Xterm' settings work for most terms like aterm, xterm, wterm and rxvt.

! Color section

XTerm*background:  #000000
XTerm*foreground:  #cfcfcf
XTerm*cursorColor: #cdc092

!black
XTerm*color0:      #000000

!red
XTerm*color1:      #e01010

!green
XTerm*color2:      #20ad20

!yellow
XTerm*color3:      #d4c24f

!blue
XTerm*color4:      #231bb8

!purple
XTerm*color5:      #9c3885

!cyan
XTerm*color6:      #1dbdb8

!white
XTerm*color7:      #fefefe

!bright-black
XTerm*color8:      #6a6a6a

!bright-red
XTerm*color9:      #e83a3d

!bright-green
XTerm*color10:     #35e956

!bright-yellow
XTerm*color11:     #ffff2f

!bright-blue
XTerm*color12:     #3a53f0

!bright-purple
XTerm*color13:     #e628ba

!bright-cyan
XTerm*color14:     #1cf5f5

!bright-white
XTerm*color15:     #ffffff


!                           Nice for manpages
!
!XTerm*underLine:           on
!XTerm*colorMode:           on
XTerm*colorBD:              lightyellow
!XTerm*colorBDMode:         off
XTerm*colorUL:              cyan
!XTerm*colorULMode:         on

XTerm*dynamicColors:        on
XTerm*highlightSelection:   true

XTerm*eightBitInput:        false
XTerm*metaSendsEscape:      true
!XTerm*oldXtermFKeys:        true
XTerm*charClass:             33:48,35-38:48,39:43,42-47:48,58-59:48,61:48,63-64:48,126:48
!XTerm*charClass:             46-47:48,58:48,64:48,63:48,95:48,126:48,61:48,37:48,35:48,43:48,36:48



rxvt*font:                  courier
rxvt.termName:              rxvt
rxvt*background:  #100020
rxvt*foreground:  #cfcfcf
rxvt*cursorColor: #FFFF00
rxvt*scrollstyle: next
rxvt*scrollTtyOutput: false
rxvt*scrollWithBuffer: false
rxvt*scrollTtyKeypress: true
rxvt*saveLines: 5000
rxvt*visualBell: true