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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:10:33 +0000
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Subject: Re: MinTTY
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 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.  

On the other hand, it isn't actually a terminal emulator as such. What 
it does do is to put a nicer interface on the Windows console, so for 
Cygwin programs you still get Cygwin's console-based terminal.

> 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.

It accesses the console's screen contents through Win32's 
GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo() and displays it in its own window while 
hiding the actual console. I can't see a way to combine this sort of 
approach with ptys.

> 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.

As things stand, it's a choice between full support either for Windows 
console applications or for Unix terminal applications. I'd guess that 
the latter is more important to most Cygwin users. Not my call though.

> 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?

Middle-click paste is always available, and copy-on-select and 
right-click extend can be enabled on the Mouse page of the options. (In 
the latter case, the menu is still available via Shift-right-click and 
the context menu key. The options can also be found in the window menu.)

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

Thanks!

> 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.

I'll give that a try. Perhaps I should make it a command line option if 
I can get it to work?

Andy


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