Improving Cywgin in Windows with rxvt

I've grown accustomed to using a terminal emulator pretty much any time I sit down to use the computer.

Most of the time I am using my laptop, which is running Linux (Ubuntu, at the moment). I've already got that workstation set up mostly how I like it. But lately I've been using my Windows 7 desktop a lot more for school related (and gaming related) things.

I use SSH all the time, and when you are using Windows, that means that your choices are limited when looking for a decent SSH client. The only choices I'm going to be considering are Cygwin and PuTTY.

PuTTY🔗

PuTTY is alright, but these are the issues I've had with it:

• Copy/Paste functionality is different.
• Highlighting text auto-copies to clipboard. Right click auto-pastes into the console.
• No simple way to set up passwordless login using SSH keys

Cygwin🔗

The learning curve for Cygwin is a little steep, but the issues I've had with it (without rxvt):

• Runs inside cmd.exe
• Cannot resize the window larger than default size without messing with cmd.exe window properties
• Copy/Paste is too difficult to use
  • Attempting to highlight text does nothing unless you are in 'mark mode'. Figure that out.
• Can't place shortcut in taskbar
  • Because the shortcut to cygwin is to a *.bat rather than *.exe

So what is the solution to this mess?

Cygwin + Rxvt🔗

• Install the rxvt package with the cygwin installer
• Create shortcut for rxvt

You can choose your own colors, fonts, and login shell

Here is the path I used in my shortcut:

cygwin-rxvt-launcher:

D:\cygwinbinrxvt.exe -sr -sl 2500 -sb -geometry 90x30 -fg green -bg black -tn rxvt -fn "Anonymous Pro-16" -e /usr/bin/zsh --login -i

Here, I'm using green text, black background and my favorite monospaced font, Anonymous Pro, at size 16 with Z-shell as my login shell.

Took me a moment to figure out copy/paste, but here is how you do it. It is an improvement, but not perfect:

Copy: Same as PuTTY. Highlight using mouse to copy text to the clipboard

Paste: Hold down Shift and left-click with your mouse.