Re: default terminal

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

On 5/31/2010 5:29 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> I'm wondering what the rest of the maintainer community thinks, though.
> 
> What do you all think about a two step plan of first making mintty part
> of the default install and then making it the default terminal?

Sounds good to me.

> Maybe it would be nice if setup.exe was smart enough to offer an
> alternative between the vanilla windows console and mintty but I can't
> make myself believe that people would understand the difference.

Yeah, I don't think we want to add an option to setup.  Perhaps,
instead, setup could create two shortcuts instead of just one.  The
first would be the same link to cygwin.bat we currently have "Cygwin";
the other "Cygwin MinTTY" would be similar to the one mintty's current
postinstall creates.  Or switch 'em around, with "Cygwin" going to
MinTTY, and "Cygwin DOSBOX" going to cygwin.bat.

> Part of the reason I want to do this is that I just saw Andy commenting
> in a "Death of Cygwin" blog post where the author was surprised that
> something like mintty existed at all.  I've seen enough people who were
> pleased by mintty that I'm thinking that it probably would be solving
> more problems than would be seen by people upset by cygwin ptys.

The advantages offered by mintty are the same ones that kept rxvt around
so long -- only mintty does a much better job of it (and Andy does a
much better job than I ever did).  rxvt had such a long history that
knowledge of it had percolated throughout the "look what I found on
google" pages pretty thoroughly; with a push, it may take quite some
time for knowledge of mintty to penetrate that much.

As I mentioned over on that other project's mailing list, cygwin users
don't appear to use native applications nearly as frequently, so the PTY
problem is much less of an issue (whereas that other project was forked
specifically to interop with a native win32 port of gcc; hence interop
with native apps was pretty much its entire raison d'etre).

So, count me all in favor of making mintty the default.

--
Chuck