One of the worst things about Windows is command.com. Even if you have Cygwin installed, using command.com as your shell stinks, if for no other reason than because copy and paste don’t really work. I just learned today that rxvt, an xterm-like application, is available as part of Cygwin. It’s a lot more flexible than command.com, and supports copy and paste like every other Windows application. It also supports X-style copy and pasting. Once you’ve installed it, change your cygwin.bat file (in the Cygwin home directory) to run a command like this one:

rxvt -geometry 80x32 -sb -sl 10000 -sr -fn "Courier New-20" -e /bin/bash --login -i

instead of this one:

bash --login -i

Update: Sadly, the MySQL command line client won’t run under rxvt. Nothing is ever perfect in life. Even so, using rxvt is well worth it.