Best way to use a shell with Cygwin in Windows 7

MinTTY - here.

It makes Cygwin entirely usable on Windows. I would be lost without it. Based on the original PuTTY code, but integrates straight into Cygwin (and in fact, is bundled with Cygwin).

Start it with,

C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -

Or where-ever you installed it. The '-' is key.

There are a few other useful additions for Cygwin as well, one being apt-cyg. It's not perfect, but it's better than running setup.exe every time you remember you're missing a package.

Even with Cygwin/X, I still use MinTTY as my primary terminal (I hate the scroll bars on xterm).

Reviving an old thread; however, I stumbled across this while doing my own search. So rather than make a new thread - Here's what I found:

http://babun.github.io/

The core of Babun consists of a pre-configured Cygwin. Cygwin is a great tool, but there’s a lot of quirks and tricks that makes you lose a lot of time to make it actually 'usable'. Not only does babun solve most of these problems, but also contains a lot of vital packages, so that you can be productive from the very first minute.

It installs quickly and sets up the environment for you, which is great, and installs pact (a package manager similar to yum / apt-get)

Uses mintty as the console.

Overall, I'd say it's a great project and the more people that use it, the better it will become.

Install Cygwin/X and use xterm. (And then you'll probably either want their version of gvim or the Windows native one.)