small report on terminal apps usability on windows

dedicated to people forced to use windows at work, who prefer unix way of life

here's a list of terminals that i tried to use on windows during some time (not less than 1 week), and some comments

1. cmd.exe
standard, always available, though very crippled and almost useless
it's the only way to run apps making use of win32 console APIs (e.g. far manager)
also take a look at console2

2. console2
i'd call it "better cmd.exe"
i'd say "just use it if you need cmd.exe"

3. cygwin+xterm+x11
best choice. works for everything except when u need to type nonascii chars.
you'll need to rebuild it from source and/or set some funky env vars to get all nice features.
main drawback is X11, and inability to type nonascii chars (nothing worked for me, but maybe there's a solution i don't know about)

4. cygwin+urxvt+x11
almost as usable as xterm, but still a bit worse.
default cygwin version is not very usable, so always build yourself.
same issues with nonascii chars.

5. msys+rxvt
used for some time in the past
mingw32 build of vim didn't work, but cygwin build MIGHT work (default msys version of vim works, though it's 5.x)
same issues with nonascii chars as cygwin

6. puttycyg
very good
works with irssi and nonascii chars (supports utf8 locale!)
actually, it's the only way to use apps like irssi on win32 i think, if you're using nonascii letters.
many hotkeys are broken in vim, so i stick with xterm for coding.
uses windows gui to draw fonts - doesn't need x11, but fonts suck (no terminus, no fixed, no proper bold text, etc).