Cygwin as a simple means to host a bash prompt (or other shell of your choice) isn't bad, especially as you can optionally use something like rxvt to do away with the backing console (with all the ...

Cygwin has a few more packages available than make, grep, awk, ls, pushd, and popd.<BR><BR>The problem with multiple cygwin1.dlls floating around is the fault of the third party packagers, not Cygwin.

The MinTTY terminal window for Cygwin puts a native Windows interface on Cygwin which offers more keyboard shortcuts and colors and styles.