Powershell, Powershell, Powershell! Seriously, people, if you have to use a windows system, put some time into learning Powershell.

* Most simple grep and sed commands are entirely do-able. Bit more verbose syntax, but that comes with a hell of a lot of easy-to-access power

* It's all about objects, rather than plain text. This can often be a pain, but Import-Csv and Export-Csv are utter LOVE. Adding additional new properties could be easier, but it is an option and can be used to great effect

* It's basically .Net for the command line, and you can get to all the power locked away in the .Net libraries

* No installation required on modern windows machines. Assuming your network admins are not overly restrictive, you get a proper shell without having to install cygwin

I can get used to the verbosity, but the archaic block editing copy/paste makes Powershell painful to use for anything more than the basics. Copying multiline text in Powershell first requires pasting it into an intermediary text editor and fixing up the new lines. And since the commands are so verbose, more often than not a command will span multiple lines.

You should switch to using ConEmu[0] as a terminal. Completely fixes the rectangular copy blocks. Just set it up to launch PowerShell as your default shell.

[0] http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Indeed, Powershell is awesome.

But Cygwin is also usefull ;)