Productivity Tool on Windows (For the GNU/Linux minded) -- First

I myself is a follower of open source software and also an addict of
GNU/Linux software tools. I cannot live without GNU tools, nor can I
program without OSS software. But in my current job, I am stuck with Windows
platform... Nevertheless, I gradually found my way to the old comfort
and joy all the GNU and other OSS software brought to me. Now, my Windows
development environment is good enough that I can live with all the short-
comings of Windows. I would like to share in my blog my experience. Hope
it will help all similar-minded others, too.

Foremost and most importantly, of course, is the shell. God knows why
Windows is still stuck with cmd.exe command line. That is really insanely
inconvenient. So a bash shell and a xterm like terminal window is of the
utmost importance.

I think most people will know the cygwin environment. Yes, that is also my
first choice. I will not talk about how to install cygwin here, as it is
so easy and www.cygwin.com is so easy to find. But I do want to point out
that, even some people install cygwin, they are still using the cmd.exe
terminal, which is default after cygwin installed. I would highly recommend
using the rxvt terminal of cygwin instead. As this make you copy and paste
from the command line so much easier than using the cmd.exe terminal. This is
easy to do. After cygwin installation, there will be a shortcut to the cygwin
lauch bat file on the Desktop (normally, unless you choose not to). Right-click
on it to bring up the context menu. Choose edit to edit the actual bat file's
content. Put something like this in it:

@echo off

REM C:
REM chdir C:\cygwin\bin

c:\cygwin\bin\rxvt --loginShell 

There you go. Rxvt and bash! See you stupid cmd.exe