Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin and Cygwin derivatives such as MSYS. To launch MSYS in a mintty window, create a shortcut to C:\msys\1.0\msys.bat, with the argument "--mintty". Some people find mintty a more accomodating terminal than cmd.exe, since it may be resized at will and has a larger scrollback buffer. However, mintty sometimes does not interoperate well with native applications (such as MinGW gcc), so the default cmd.exe console is recommended for most users.