default cygwin terminal and environment

anyone that installed cygwin and used it out of the box knows about the limitations of the default terminal: those awkward scrolling errors, resizing pain, limits on the scroll buffer, colors, etc.

i never bothered to get it fixed. until now that is. use rxvt instead (you need to install it first): create a shortcut with the following command line:

D:\programs\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe \
-vb -sr -sl 20000 \
-fn courier \
-g 120x50 \
-e /usr/bin/bash \
--login -i

man rxvt to see what those actually mean. then edit your .bash_profile (in case your $HOME is unnatural and your .bashrc does not get read) and add the following:

    alias less='/bin/less -r'
    alias ls='/bin/ls -F --color=tty --show-control-chars'

you should also put the following in your .vimrc:

syntax enable
filetype on
filetype plugin on
set ts=2
set number
set ai
set si

and you also might want to grab rhtml syntax plugin for vim.

this will get the expected stuff working (ctrl-pgup/pgdn, colors, proper terminal handling when you login to remote hosts via ssh, etc). note that you copy on selection and paste with the middle mouse button or shift-insert.