Want to have GNU/Linux utilities at hand on a Windows box? Suffer no more. Cygwin brings you that along with its several packages (GNU etc.) bringing recompiled versions of these for Windows.

Just to name a few out-of-the-box packages:

• Interpreters: bash 4.x, ksh, zsh etc.
• Servers: Apache web server, PostgreSQL, sqlite3
• Scripting languages: Perl, Python, Ruby etc.
• Utilities: cron, md5deep etc.
• Version control: bzr (bazaar), git, subversion etc.

Remember: this is just to name a few! There are a myriad of packages for you to choose from.

Having bash 4 available is priceless. Do your normal shell scripting tranquile in Windows!

Also, one of the main attractions in terms of usefulness that Cygwin brings us is the mintty terminal emulator (intended for use with Cygwin on Windows). It has several awesome features like:

• It is fast!
• Making the user able to customize the colors, font and cursor type.
• Control the behavior for the backspace key (^H etc.).
• Command line options to hold execution (-h option) after execution of any command (-c command, as stated in mintty tips on google code), and also controlling the initial state of the window for when you create a shortcut for it (option -w max makes it start maximized).
• Handling the copying with left mouse button selection well and preventing bad situations regarding line wrapping while doing so. ctrl + insert and shift + insert for copy and paste (respectively) are accepted as well.
• Scroll with shift + {arrow|pgdn|pgup} .
• Toggle on / off many of the program’s functions.
• Window transparency.

Comparing mintty to the default terminal emulator in cygwin one can conclude that the former is a very significant improvement. For more, check this great article on mintty and also this one at howtogeek.com (more complete).

Try cygwin if you still had not and let us know of your explorations! Happy scripting!