How is this better than simply using rxvt?
I used rxvt for some time but puttycyg rolls better for me. - I remember accented chars (french) often got messed up and that was a pain to fix. - I never manager to make rxvt display special chars correctly (mc and others look like crap without them) and even if i did, that meant giving up accented chars, as rxvt supplied fonts are ASCII 127 chars, not Ext ASCII 255 chars. - Switching rxvt fonts under native windows gives weird spacing. Any font I found (incl. by STFW) that would supposedly work was either english-only 127 characters, not mapping accented chars correctly, not mapping special chars correctly, or both. => everything works OOTB with puttycyg. There were other things here and there that were finally turning me away of rxvt.
Note that it's _only_ valid on _native_ windows, not X11 (which I don't use, so I didn't test), where it wouldn't have much meaning to compare them. There might just be ways to fix things under X but as I was not interested in running it, I skipped researching it. There's but one thing I regret from rxvt in puttycyg: if a process forks in the background, and I exit the login shell, rxvt closes its window and the process continues to run, while puttycyg will keep the window opened until the process goes down (kill or whatever through another console). it seemed to behave the same with cmd console. Sometimes it's "useful" when you forgot to kill that lighttpd you ran just for testing, sometimes not, when you spawn another console ($ putty &) and you want to close only the former. Especially, closing the former the hard way will close the latter too. Just to be clear : I'm not saying puttycyg is better, I'm just saying it fits my needs.
