Using mintty as default terminal on Cygwin and default shell as bash

There are several different ways to do it:

1. Specify bash as a command-line argument to mintty, as mentioned by Salton.
2. Set the Windows SHELL environment variable to /usr/bin/bash.
3. Make sure you have an /etc/passwd (see mkpasswd(1)) in your Cygwin environment, and set the shell for your UID to /usr/bin/bash. Cygwin doesn't supply a chsh or usermod command, so you'll probably have to edit the file by hand if you want to use this method.

From the mintty(1) manpage:

INVOCATION
   If a program name is supplied on the command line, this is executed
   with any additional arguments given.  Otherwise, mintty looks for a
   shell to execute in the SHELL environment variable.  If that is not
   set, it reads the user's default shell setting from /etc/passwd.  As a
   last resort, it falls back to /bin/sh.  If a single dash is specified
   instead of a program name, the shell is invoked as a login shell.

You can launch mintty bash for bash to be default

suppose this file name is mintty.bat, double click this file will open a mintty terminal, and with bash, path & pwd all settled down.

---

@echo off

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe /bin/bash --login -i