Re: MinTTY

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:51:06AM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>It sounds like it would get enough votes.  In fact, if it operates like
>an xterm on Windows maybe it should even be the default program that is
>invoked by cygwin.bat.

I finally played around with this a little.  It is nice.   It reminds
me a little bit of Console2 - http://console.sourceforge.net/.

One thing that Console2 does is provide a true "console" interface which
doesn't rely on anything like Cygwin's ptys.  Console2 allows resizing
and customization of mouse behavior.

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to find some way to improve
cygwin's pty behavior so that ptys behave like real windows consoles.
Console2 apparently uses a polling interface over a captive invisible
console to fool programs into thinking that they are running in a real
Windows console.  I don't feel like I should look too closely like this
because Console2 is GPLed and I'd taint my ability to contribute any
code back to Cygwin.

The downside of Console2's method is that the polling causes a little
bit of lagginess in typing, on my system at least.  You don't see that
on mintty even though it is using cygwin's ptys which are not exactly
tuned for performance.

On further reflection, I think that the fact that mintty uses cygwin
ptys may be a show stopper as far as making it the default is concerned.
I don't think we can have the default command line interface misbehave
when it runs some standard Windows programs, like, if memory serves, the
"NET" command in some cases.

Also, the mouse behavior isn't like xterm or xterm imitators so it
wouldn't necessarily be intuitive for someone coming over from linux.
I'm sure that could be changed though.  Did I miss a configuration
for mouse and cut/paste behavior?

I still think it would be a nice addition to the list of Cygwin
packages.  It gets my +1 vote.

Oh, and if you want to get rid of the console window when mintty is
started from a bat file, I think FreeConsole() would do the trick.

cgf

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/