Cygwin includes some nice built-in aliases for colorizing terminal output, but the default blue hue is so dark as to be unreadable on the black background. It’s easy to fix, though; just add the following Blue and BoldBlue lines to your ~/.minttyrc file:

Blue=64,64,255
BoldBlue=127,127,255


These lines will use a lighter shade of blue than the default, so you’ll be able to read it in a less-than-pitch-dark room. As an example, here’s my complete ~/.minttyrc file:

BoldAsFont=no
Transparency=high
Font=Consolas
FontHeight=10
ClicksTargetApp=no
Columns=120
Rows=52
ScrollbackLines=100000
Term=xterm-256color
Blue=64,64,255
BoldBlue=127,127,255