Cygwin Fonts and Performance

You can greatly increase the responsiveness of the shell terminal in cygwin by changing the font settings. By default, the shell is using a raster font instead of a true type font, which causes slow standard output, pager scrolling etc…

open a cygwin shell
left click on the cygwin icon at the upper left
click 'Properties'
on the 'Font' tab, select 'Lucida Console' (or another monospaced true type font of your choice), and set the size as desired
set any other selections as desired, such as alternate background/foreground color
click ok, and select 'Modify the shortcut that started this window'
the cygwin shell should now be much faster