The terminal is an important aspect of Cygwin like for any Unix-based OS. For this reason, you might see its users like me chasing after fancy ways of beautifying it. Well, I will try to make this the last time.
Poderosa is the best terminal emulator for Cygwin that I have come across. It has a tabbed GUI, much like the PuTTY Connection Manager. However, in addition to the network communication protocols through which one can connect to a remote system using PuTTY, local Cygwin shells can also be opened using Poderosa. I use it mainly for the latter purpose.

Poderosa allows …read more

First Juan was not excited about this year’s MacWorld. Then he worried about Steve Jobs’ hormone imbalance, which I must say is something only Apple lovers are capable of. Now, after watching MacWorld ‘09, he decides that Phil Schiller’s keynote was just fine.
Jason, celebrating his three-year anniversary at Microsoft Weblog, sees a surge in Zune’s popularity since the 30GB Zune owners started experiencing widespread failure and Microsoft subsequently updating them about its fix. He still wants to buy Zune, but do you recommend it?
Clair introduces us to a cool terminal user whom all lovers of CLI can follow on Twitter …read more

 
Cygwin loads its settings from a file called .profile present in the HOME environment variable. By default, HOME is set to /home/<username> which in Windows can be reached in C:\cygwin\home\<username> (assuming you have installed Cygwin in C:\cygwin folder).
.profile can be opened using any text editor. Here you can set colors to be displayed, prompt, history, aliases, default working directory, and any banner you may wish. The colors you choose will interfere with the colors set in your command prompt.
Below is a sample .profile.
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# .profile
# Define some colors first:
red=’\e[0;31m'
RED='\e[1;31m'
green='\e[0;32m'
GREEN='\e[1;32m'
yellow='\e[0;33m'
YELLOW='\e[1;33m'
blue='\e[0;34m'
BLUE='\e[1;34m'
pink='\e[0;35m'
PINK='\e[1;35m'
cyan='\e[0;36m'
CYAN='\e[1;36m'
NC='\e[0m'
# Colors and Prompt
export PS1="\[\e]2;\u@\h:\w\007$green\]\u@\h:\[$pink\]\w\[$blue\]$ \[$BLUE\]“          # Word wrap of previous line.
set -o …read more