Mintty

Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin, based on code from PuTTY 0.60 by Simon Tatham and team.

It can be downloaded from here or it can be installed through Cygwin's setup.exe program, where it can be found in the Shells category. The Cygwin installer creates a shortcut for mintty in the Windows start menu.

Mintty should work on Windows 2000 and above. It gets tested on XP, Vista, and se7en. Similarly to other pty-based Cygwin terminals, however, mintty is not a full replacement for the Windows Command Prompt. While Windows console programs with simple text output are usually fine, interactive programs often do not work correctly, although sometimes there are workarounds.

Features:

• Xterm-compatible terminal emulation, including support for modifier keys and application mouse mode.
• Native Windows user interface that tries to keep things simple.
• Support for UTF-8, CJK fonts, and Windows IMEs.
• Drag & drop and copy & paste of text, files and folders. (Files and folders are inserted as quoted filenames.)
• Mousewheel events can be sent as arrow keys. (This allows mousewheel scrolling e.g. in less.)
• Options are stored in a text file. No registry entries.
• Window transparency.
• Program icon created by KDE's Oxygen project.
• Small executable size (currently

What is new in this release:

• Fixed crash when trying to insert or erase out-of-range lines.
• Implemented xterm title stack feature (limited to 16 entries).
• Failure to load a custom program icon now triggers a warning rather than a fatal error.

What is new in version 1.0.2:

• Fixed a bug that caused attributes for the wrong cells to be picked up when copying characters on systems with a double-byte default codepage.
• Added missing O_TRUNC flag when opening a log file.
• Take bold attribute into account when determining font coverage via the OSC 7771 sequence.
• Ignore title request sequence instead of sending an empty reply.
• On Cygwin 1.7, stop setting LANG to the system default locale (currently "C.UTF-8") if the locale isn't set either in the environment or in the options.
• Reflect Cygwin 1.7.10 name change of pty master devices from "/dev/ttyN" to "/dev/ptyN" when creating utmp entries.

What is new in version 1.0.1:

• Fixed a bug in the creation of utmp entries that limited the number of mintty entries to 10. Also prepared for the possibility of Cygwin switching to the Unix98 pty naming scheme.
• Included semicolon in word selection, for the sake of URLs using them to separate parameters.
• The cursor now is updated immediately when its shape is changed using the DECSCUSR control sequence.

What is new in version 0.9.9:

• The transparency level can now be set to any value ranging from 4 to 254 in the config file or in the command line. (For backward compatibility, values below 4 are multiplied by 16. 255 is "Glass".)
• Implemented mintty-specific OSC sequence 7771 for checking which characters are available in the currently selected font.
• Ctrl+symbol and Ctrl+number combinations that yield control characters are no longer overridden in xterm "modifyOtherKeys" mode level 1, but only level 2.
• Stopped sending bogus control sequences for some Ctrl+symbol combinations. Also stopped trying to add Shift to Ctrl+symbol combinations to obtain a control character. That's only done for Ctrl+number combinations now.
• Moved implementation of private mode 30 (as introduced by rxvt) for hiding and showing the scrollbar to the mintty-specific private mode 7766, because it doesn't do quite the same thing: instead of changing window size to account for the width of the scrollbar, mintty changes the number of character columns.
• Stopped rogue mouse release events being sent when application mouse mode is overridden with Shift.
• Middle button paste now happens on release rather than click of the button, as in xterm and rxvt.

What is new in version 0.9.7:

• Fixed crash when scrollback size is set to zero.
• Fixed support for codepoints beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) in Cygwin 1.5 and MSYS.
• NT4 support is officially gone. It had been broken since version 0.6.1 anyway, without anyone complaining.
• When the window is held open after the shell finished and no more processes are attached, hitting Enter or Escape will now close the window.
• Changed the optional Ctrl+Shift shortcut for closing the window from Ctrl+Shift+Q to the more standard-compliant Ctrl+Shift+W.
• Added config file versions of command line options: Class, Hold, Icon, Log, Title, Utmp, Window, X, Y.
• Multiple-choice settings are now written with named values rather than integers, e.g. CursorType=block instead of the rather non-obvious CursorType=0. Similarly, Boolean settings are written as yes or no instead of 0 or 1. Integer values of course remain supported for backward compatibility.
• String settings no longer have arbitrary length restrictions.
• Unknown settings and invalid values now trigger warnings.

What is new in version 0.9.6:

• Fixed crash triggered by lots of combining characters on the same line.
• Corrected initialisation of the bold background colour. (This is used to display the blink attribute when blinking is disabled.)
• Added Show bold as font option. Previously, disabling Show bold as colour would cause text with the bold attribute to be displayed with a thicker font instead of a brighter colour. Having these as separate options allows bold text to be shown with both a thicker font and a brighter colour, which is the default in xterm and others. The mintty default remains bold-as-colour-only.
• Added options that allow to disable the copy and paste shortcuts Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins as well as the various Alt+Fn window command shortcuts.
• Added an option for enabling a set of Ctrl+Shift+letter shortcuts as found in KDE Konsole and GNOME Terminal, as an alternative to the Ctrl/Shift+Ins and Alt+Fn shortcuts. Examples include Ctrl+Shift+V for paste and Ctrl+Shift+N for opening a new window. (These only appear in menus if the corresponding default shortcuts are disabled.)
• Tweaked option wording and placement (again). The scrolling option now are all on the Window pane of the options dialog.

What is new in version 0.9.5:

• This maintenance release brings various small tweaks and fixes. For example, terminal line settings were brought into line with other terminal emulators, exit handling was redesigned, and a resizing problem in connection with the bbLean window manager was addressed.

What is new in version 0.9.4:

• Flow control with ^S/^Q was reinstated.
• Instead, the "ixany" terminal flag is set to restart output on any input character and thus protect users from seemingly hanging their terminal.
• The options dialog also had a few tweaks.

What is new in version 0.9.3:

• Crashes in the handling of combining characters and network paths were fixed.
• Flow control is no longer enabled by default.
• Font zooming no longer resizes the window.
• Exit handling was improved.