A Prompt You Can Stand

For the past four years, Windows has been a very sophisticated operating system. It has provided stability, efficient pre-emptive multitasking, solid memory protection, POSIX compatibility, an acceptable (though unimpressive) file system, good multi-user support and increasingly good development tools (Visual Studio is truly fantastic nowadays).
However, one aspect where Windows comes short of its free competition is its command shell. Windows always had some level of support for batch files, but not the wealth of command line tools to fully exploit automation. In addition, the shell interface is horrible. The configuration settings are limited, and the window width can not be dynamically changed. Having briefly played with the betas of Microsoft’s next generation shell, codenamed Monad or MSH, it looks like the user interface will continue to be poor for the next few years even though scripting capabilities will be fantastic.
However, there is a better alternative available. Cygwin, a popular port of Unix scripts, APIs and tools, provides Windows users with the power and convenience of traditional Unix tools like grep, and an alternative command terminal that can host bash.



Personally I have found this to provide a good alternative to the standard Windows command prompt. You get a highly responsive terminal, with tab completion and history, and the ability to change the window size whenever you want to. All of the Unix tools that you expect are here (or can be automatically downloaded). Some of the downsides that I have found include a really ugly non-standard scrollbar, and an inability to drag files onto the shell from Explorer to automatically obtain their path. Some people even run GNU/Emacs in this environment. I tried the same, but noticed that the bottom-most line would disappear. Very annoying.
All in all, I have been happy to trade my dusty old MS-DOS prompt for a shiny new bash prompt.