How did I not know about this?

“Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin. It is based on code from PuTTY 0.60 by Simon Tatham and team.”

Previously I’ve been using PuTTYcyg which is a version of PuTTY with Cygwin support added. It’s good, but mintty seems a lot neater – rather than being a hacked version of PuTTY it’s a dedicated application derived from it. Also, it’s actually packaged in Cygwin which is a plus.

This could almost be an elegant replacement for the (truly abysmal) Windows command prompt, except that a complete replacement would need to be compatible with the vast array of existing console applications – and that’s a rather difficult task for technical raisins. The author has also developed a program which should solve part of the issue, and deserves investigation.