Color in Cygwin terminal

Question

I've installed cygwin because I'm a bit fed up with the Windows terminal not being great. The only problem I'm having is the lack of colours.

You can see the problem in the following 2 screenshots that display the same command:

All I want is something which has a nice font, resizes properly (including proper behaviour when maximised) and support for colours. Ideally I'd like tabs too. This seems like a silly reason to end up buying a mac, so I'm hoping I can get all these things on windows somehow.

Answer 1

Copy of the answer from stackoverflow.

I'm the author of ConEmu - opensource console emulator with tabs, which represents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window.

Initially, the program was designed to work with Far Manager (my favorite shell replacement - file and archive management, command history and completion, powerful editor). But ConEmu can be used with any other console application or simple GUI tools (like PuTTY for example). ConEmu is a live project, open to suggestions.

A brief excerpt from the long list of options:

• Smooth resize, maximized and fullscreen window modes
• User friendly text and block selection (from keyboard or mouse), copy, paste, text search in console
• Optional settings (e.g. pallette) for selected applications
• ANSI X3.64 and Xterm 256 color
• Use any font installed in the system, or copied to a folder of the program (ttf, otf, fon, bdf)
• Run selected tabs as Administrator (Vista+) or as selected user
• Windows 7 Jump lists and Progress on taskbar
• Integration with DosBox (useful in 64bit systems to run DOS applications)
• Scrollbar initially hidden, may be revealed by mouseover or checkbox in settings

Far Manager users will acquire shell style drag-n-drop, thumbnails and tiles in panles, tabs for editors and viewers, true colors and font styles (italic/bold/underline).

Answer 2

Look at these two alternatives to the default Cygwin terminal,

1. MinTTY
   • I prefer this one; am not much of a tab fan -- I like overlapping windows :-)
2. Terminator
   • Multiple Tabs - Like tabbed browsing, only with terminals
   • Windows x86 .msi: Requires Cygwin <= 1.7.7 and Cygwin Ruby and 32 bit Java.

Answer 3

If you're familiar with Emacs, you may like M-x shell. It has all that you suggests, and of course quite a bit more.

Answer 4

I found that using a recent Cygwin install (2015-09), I can see colors of my logs in a simple Cygwin Terminal, using cat or more.

piped with grep, it's powerfull enough to see what you want.

No need to install anything else