Use PuTTY as a local terminal emulator?

Currently, I use PuTTY for SSHing into my linux server and Cygwin for local development when working on my Windows machine. Sadly, the terminal emulator that comes with Cygwin doesn't approach the quality of the excellent terminal emulator that comes with PuTTY. And it occurs to me that there really shouldn't be any conceptual difference between connecting PuTTY to a remote server over SSH and using PuTTY locally as a Windows shell to interface with the Cygwin system... but I haven't been able to figure out how to do this for the life of me. Is it possible to use P开发者_StackOverflowuTTY this way? If so, how?

Take a look at PuTTyCyg.

Also I like to use MinTTY available through the Cygwin installer...

I suppose if you somehow managed to install and start an ssh server on your local cygwin environment, putty should be able to connect to localhost

PuTTY lets you connect to servers with ssh. Have you tried running an sshd on your Cygwin, and connecting to localhost with PuTTY ?