After years of ignorance I discovered the wonderful GNU screen program on my GNU/Linux system. Basically screen is a window manager for terminals or terminal sessions. But after installing the Cygwin package on my Windows box I ended up with this error message after trying to invoke screen:
C:\>screen
Cannot find terminfo entry for 'cygwin'.
This is unlikely to help others, but I’ll keep it as a reference… The culprit was a messed up installation. I had the following directories:
/usr/share/tabset # <- this folder was empty
/usr/share/tabset(2)
/usr/share/terminfo # <- this folder was empty
/usr/share/terminfo(2)
I just had to delete the empty directories and rename tabset(2) and terminfo(2)
$ rmdir /usr/share/tabset /usr/share/terminfo
$ mv /usr/share/tabset\(2\) /usr/share/tabset
$ mv /usr/share/terminfo\(2\) /usr/share/terminfo
and now screen works just fine with Cygwin.