Mintty is a fantastic terminal program; it’s now the default with Cygwin for some time. There are a range of others such as xterm and rxvt, but mintty does the trick for me. You can change all the settings by right-clicking on the window and going into ‘options’, but that modifies a file called .minttyrc in your home directory, so you have the alternative of using a text editor if you wish. Mine goes like so:

#
# .minttyrc - Configuration file for mintty terminal
#

BoldAsFont=no
Font=Anonymous Pro
FontHeight=12
Rows=45
Term=xterm-256color

ForegroundColour= 131, 148, 150
BackgroundColour= 0, 43, 54
CursorColour= 220, 50, 47

Black=7, 54, 66
BoldBlack=0, 43, 54
Red=220, 50, 47
BoldRed=203, 75, 22
Green=133, 153, 0
BoldGreen=88, 110, 117
Yellow=181, 137, 0
BoldYellow=101, 123, 131
Blue=38, 139, 210
BoldBlue=131, 148, 150
Magenta=211, 54, 130
BoldMagenta=108, 113, 196
Cyan=42, 161, 152
BoldCyan=147, 161, 161
White=238, 232, 213
BoldWhite=253, 246, 227

Scrollbar=none

What this does, amongst other things, is set the terminal to use the colours from the ‘solarized’ colorscheme, by Ethan Schoonover. Colourschemes are a personal thing, but this is a good choice. Another way of creating a colour scheme, or selecting from several other good options is to go to http://terminal.sexy, selecting/creating a colour scheme, then exporting it, using the ‘minTTY’ option.

Fonts

You may also notice above is a reference to the ‘anonymous pro’ font, which I am a big fan of. From the font’s readme file:

Anonymous Pro is the work of Mark Simonson, and you can find the font at his site here.