I don’t touch Windows much anymore (games and demos in Boot Camp, and EAC and a few other programs in VMWare), but when I’m in there, cmd.exe serves as a constant reminder that I’d rather be elsewhere (Console is an open source attempt to improve the default console). The obvious solution is to bring your UNIX tools with you, which is where Cygwin comes in. Here are some setup notes.

• I make a setup folder in C:\cygwin\setup, otherwise it just dumps the it’s packages in a folder where you’re running the setup.exe from
• Some “essentials” that don’t get installed by default: Devel/subversion, Net/openssh, Net/rsync, Shells/rxvt
• The last one is important because by default, the default blue is too dark (of course). Here’s directions on setting up a proper rxvt .bat file, and then the relevant lines you want in your .Xdefaults:

  rxvt*color4: SteelBlue1
  rxvt*color12: SteelBlue1

  These change the dark blue and blue defaults respectively (I also like RoyalBlue — here’s a list of XTerm colors; you can also enter hex colors directly if you’d like) Also, for a good list of what color0-color15 are. (aside: this is the correct answer to an unanswered Ask Metafilter question from a few years back, but I guess there’s no way to comment on old closed questions)

• The other big thing is file permissions, which I’ve only run into when rsyncing (I use -avP as my default copy mode). I haven’t done anything with that except for making aliases that chmod 755 and 644 before I need to make copies.

Also, while Fusion has it’s own fast launch (cmd-L), if you’re in Boot Camp, I recommend Launchy, which helps a bit w/ the Quicksilver withdrawals.