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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

PuTTY is so much better just at the UI level than Window's command prompt that I wish stuff like Cygwin and msysgit could use it instead. Unfortunately it doesn't seem the code is very modular.

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Maybe it sounds like overkill, but I use SSH to localhost to access the cygwin, as I typically need functioning SSH anyway. Combined with Pageant, I don't have to type login and I type pageant password only once after the boot and it just works. It's all the stuff I need anyway so I don't have to use any patched version of something.

i've done this for years, and it isn't entirely ideal, but i really really like it

Have you tried MinTTY? It's based on PuTTY's terminal emulation code, and provides shells for Cygwin and MSys. http://mintty.googlecode.com/

Has anyone ever tried to use mintty with msysgit? I couldn't get ssh and vim to work.

This isn't perfect, but it's what I use and it works well.

http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/

I use this, too, and it's excellent with cygwin. Also if you use Puttygen to generate RSA keys you can set-up easy one-click access to your favorite servers.

Console2 is a nice replacement of cmd.exe for cygwin/mysysgit like sessions. http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

I like Console2, but it's had a long running bug for me on multiple machines and Windows versions where the last line of the console won't display any characters after scrolling the window, and it eventually drove me nuts enough to stop using it.

I suggest using Cygwin's xterm instead of cmd.exe for accessing Cygwin. You can modify the Cygwin startup script (or create another one) to start X and an xterm automatically. It scrolls a lot faster than cmd.exe and seems less Rube Goldbergian than using PuTTY to connect to localhost.

If you're on Windows, try http://en.poderosa.org/

Their default color scheme (black on white) is something I change right after install, but having tabbing and hefty scroll buffers is nice.

I don't know about msysgit, but I use it with Cygwin all the time.

Just have the cygwin SSHd port running (which I tend to want installed and configured for other reasons anyway) and use PuTTY to connect to that.

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