Mintty supports a number of common places to look for and save its configuration and resources.

For its configuration, it reads configuration files in this order:

• /etc/minttyrc
• $APPDATA/mintty/config
• ~/.config/mintty/config
• ~/.minttyrc

For resource files to configure a colour scheme, wave file for the bell character, localization files, emoji graphics, dynamic fonts, pointer shapes, it looks for subfolders themes, sounds, lang, emojis, fonts, pointers, respectively, in the directories

• ~/.mintty
• ~/.config/mintty
• $APPDATA/mintty
• /usr/share/mintty

The ~/.config/mintty folder is the XDG default base directory. The $APPDATA/mintty folder is especially useful to share common configuration for various installations of mintty (e.g. Cygwin 32/64 Bit, MSYS, Git Bash, WSL). An additional directory for a configuration file and configuration resources can be given with command-line parameter --configdir.

The Cygwin setup.exe package for mintty installs a shortcut in the Windows start menu under All Programs/Cygwin. It starts mintty with a ‘-’ (i.e. a single dash) as its only argument, which tells it to invoke the user’s default shell as a login shell.

Shortcuts are also a convenient way to start mintty with additional options and different commands. For example, shortcuts for access to remote machines can be created by invoking ssh. The command simply needs to be appended to the target field of the shortcut’s properties:

Target: C:\Cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe /bin/ssh server

The cygutils package provides the mkshortcut utility for creating shortcuts from the command line. See its manual page for details.

If invoked from a Windows shortcut (desktop or start menu), mintty starts the shell in login mode implicitly (since mintty 3.4.7) unless disabled with option LoginFromShortcut.

In a Windows shortcut (desktop or Start menu), a "Shortcut key" with modifiers can be defined as a system hotkey to start an application or bring it to the front.

To have a new instance started with every usage of the hotkey, use the command-line option -D for mintty in the shortcut target.

Mintty detects if activated via hotkey and will use the same hotkey to minimize itself in turn, unless inhibited by shortcut override mode. The preferred appearance of the hotkey-activated terminal window can further be customized with options in the shortcut, e.g.

C:\Cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe --pos top --size maxwidth -

In a Windows desktop shortcut, (since mintty 2.2.3) it is suggested to not specify an icon in the command line, as mintty detects and uses the icon from the invoking shortcut. If for any reason, an icon is to be specified, it should be the same in the mintty command line (shortcut properties Target:) as in the shortcut itself (Change Icon...).

Windows 7 and above use the application ID for grouping taskbar items. By default this setting is empty, in which case Windows groups taskbar items automatically based on their icon and command line. This can be overridden by setting the AppID to a custom string, in which case windows with the same AppID are grouped together.

The AppID supports placeholder parameters for a flexible grouping configuration (see manual). The special value AppID=@ causes mintty to derive an implicit AppID from the WSL system name, in order to achieve WSL distribution-specific taskbar grouping. This resolves taskbar grouping problems in some cases (wsltty issue #96) but causes similar problems in other cases (issue #784).

Warning: Using this option in a Windows desktop shortcut may cause trouble with taskbar grouping behaviour. If you need to do that, the shortcut itself should also get attached with the same AppId.

Note: Since 2.9.6, if mintty is started via a Windows shortcut which has its own AppID, it is reused for the new mintty window in order to achieve proper taskbar icon grouping. This takes precedence over an explicit setting of the AppID option.

Explanation: Note that Windows shortcut files have their own AppID. Hence, if an AppID is specified in the mintty settings, but not on a taskbar-pinned shortcut for invoking mintty, clicking the pinned shortcut will result in a separate taskbar item for the new mintty window, rather than being grouped with the shortcut.

Hint: To avoid AppID inconsistence and thus ungrouped taskbar icons, the shortcut's AppID should to be set to the same string as the mintty AppID, which can be done using the winappid utility available in the mintty utils repository. As noted above, since mintty 2.9.6, the mintty AppID does not need to be set anymore in this case.

Launch commands from the taskbar icon and its menu can be configured with settings AppName, AppLaunchCmd and TaskCommands ("jump list"). This can be made persistent with command line setting --store-taskbar-properties.

See also the section on Virtual Tabs and Tabbar for configuration of session invocations from the context menu with setting SessionCommands.

Taskbar pinning of a mintty window can be prevented with command line setting --nopin.

Bell highlighting of the taskbar icon is enabled by default and can be disabled with option BellTaskbar.

Progress indication on the taskbar icon can be switched dynamically or pre-configured with options ProgressBar and ProgressScan. To enable progress indication e.g. for the MSYS2 package manager pacman:

• ProgressBar=1
• ProgressScan=2

For grouping of window icons in the taskbar, Windows uses the intricate AppID concept as explained above. For grouping of desktop windows, as used by the mintty session switcher or tabbar, or external window manipulation tools, Windows uses the distinct but likewise intricate Class concept. Mintty provides flexible configuration to set up either of them, see manual.

The icons (taskbar icon and title bar icon) can be changed dynamically with an OSC I escape sequence. Example:

echo -e "\e]I;`printenv 'ProgramFiles(x86)'`/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe,4\a"

If you are frequently facing this problem, it is not really a mintty issue, but it may reportedly help if you turn off the Windows ASLR feature for cygwin-based programs; turn off Mandatory ASLR for mintty, cygwin-console-helper, your shell and other programs as described in issue #493 or using Powershell commands as described in wsltty issue #6.

If you have any Linux distribution for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed, mintty can be called from cygwin to run a WSL terminal session:

• mintty --WSL=Ubuntu
• mintty --WSL (for the Default distribution as set with wslconfig /s or wsl -s)

Note, the wslbridge2 gateways need to be installed in /bin for this purpose (see below for details). (Fallback to legacy wslbridge on older Windows is supported.)

A WSL terminal session can be configured for the mintty session launcher in the config file, like:

• SessionCommands=Ubuntu:--WSL=Ubuntu

For a standalone mintty deployment as a WSL terminal, also providing desktop and start menu shortcuts, command line launch scripts, and optional Windows Explorer integration, install wsltty, using either the wsltty installer, a Chocolatey package, or a Windows Appx package.

To help reproduce the installation manually, for users of cygwin or msys2:

• Download from the https://github.com/Biswa96/wslbridge2 repository
• Install package dependencies make, g++, linux-headers in WSL
• Build the wslbridge2 gateways with
  • make RELEASE=1 for the frontends (e.g. from cygwin)
  • wsl make RELEASE=1 or wsl -d distro make RELEASE=1 for the backends
• From subdirectory bin, install the gateway tools wslbridge2.exe and wslbridge2-backend into your /bin directory
• Make a desktop shortcut (Desktop right-click – New ▸ Shortcut) with
  • Target: X:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe --WSL=distro -, with the desired WSL distro (or empty for default)
  • Icon location (Change Icon…) as appropriate; the wsltty installer will find the distro-specific icon

Replace X:\cygwin64 with your cygwin or msys2 root directory path and Linux_Distribution with your preferred distribution. The suitable icon location for each respective distribution is not easily found; the standalone package would set that up for you in the shortcuts. For other invocation (cygwin or Windows command line), mintty finds the suitable WSL icon itself.

Note that older wslbridge2 backends used not to be interoperable among systems with different libraries (glibc vs musl). The distro Alpine had been checked out to build a backend that works with all Linux distributions; builds of later wslbridge2 are reported to be interoperable though.

At the end of the mintty --WSL invocation line, you may add an explicit WSL shell invocation like /bin/bash -l to select your favourite shell or ask for a login shell (-l), or set a start directory (-C, before any shell command) if desired.

If no start directory is otherwise selected, the “Start in:” directory of the shortcut may be set to %USERPROFILE%.

On Windows 7, mintty may also be used as a terminal for the Subsystem for UNIX-based applications (SUA), also known as Interix. For the mintty session launcher, this can be configured for the available shells as follows (concatenated with ‘;’ separator for multiple targets):

• SessionCommands=Interix Korn Shell:/bin/winpty C:\Windows\posix.exe /u /c /bin/ksh -l
• SessionCommands=Interix SVR-5 Korn Shell:/bin/winpty posix /u /p /svr-5/bin/ksh /c -ksh
• SessionCommands=Interix C Shell:/bin/winpty posix /u /c /bin/csh -l

For a desktop or start menu shortcut, the respective target command would look like X:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe winpty … (and may use the icon location %SystemRoot%\Installer{DB88A98A-792B-4441-8E60-05A6D3E2B2C0}\sh.exe).

In order to start mintty from a batch file it needs to be invoked through the start command. This avoids the batch file’s console window staying open while mintty is running. For example:

start mintty -

The console window for the batch file will still show up briefly, however. This can be avoided by invoking mintty from a shortcut instead, as described above.

The working directory for a mintty session can be set in the Start In field of a shortcut, or by changing directory in an invoking script, or with option --dir. Note, however, that Cygwin’s /etc/profile script for login shells automatically changes to the user’s home directory. The profile script can be told not to do this by setting a variable called CHERE_INVOKING, like this:

mintty /bin/env CHERE_INVOKING=1 /bin/bash -l

Note: If mintty is run from a shortcut with empty Start In field and the effective start directory is within the Windows system folder, mintty changes it in order to avoid failure when creating a log file.

Cygwin’s chere package can be used to create folder context menu entries in Explorer, which allow a shell to be opened with the working directory set to the selected folder.

The following command will create an entry called Bash Prompt Here for the current user that will invoke bash running in mintty. See the chere manual (man chere) for all the options.

chere -1 -i -c -t mintty

Note, however, that context menu entries created by chere fail on non-ASCII directory names. Mintty option --dir comes to help, like in either of these registry entries for registry keys like /HKCU/Software/Classes/Directory/Shell/mintty-here/command/:

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe --dir "%1" /bin/bash
C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe --dir "%1" /bin/env CHERE_INVOKING=1 /bin/bash -l

Unfortunately Windows shortcuts do not allow the setting of environment variables. Variables can be set globally though via a button on the Advanced tab of the system properties. Those can be reached by right-clicking on the (My) Computer entry in the start menu or on the desktop, selecting Properties, then Advanced System Settings.

Alternatively, global variables can be set using the setx command line utility. This comes pre-installed with some versions of Windows but is also available as part of the freely downloadable Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools.

The env utility can be used to set variables specifically for the program to be run in mintty, e.g.:

mintty /bin/env DISPLAY=:0 /bin/ssh -X server

When interacting with programs that use a native Windows API for command-line user interaction (“console mode”), a number of undesirable effects used to be observed; this is the pty incompatibility problem and the character encoding incompatibility problem. This would basically affect all programs not compiled in a cygwin or msys environment (and note that MinGW is not msys in this context), and would occur in all pty-based terminals (like xterm, rxvt etc).

Cygwin 3.1.0 compensates for this issue via the ConPTY API of Windows 10. On MSYS2, its usage can be enabled by setting the environment variable MSYS=enable_pcon (or selecting this setting when installing an older version). You can also later set MSYS=enable_pcon in file /etc/git-bash.config. MSYS2 releases since 2022-10-28 enable ConPTY by default. You can also set mintty option ConPTY=true to override the MSYS2 setting.

As a workaround on older versions of Cygwin or Windows, you can use winpty as a wrapper to invoke the Windows program.

When running native Windows programs, like wsl access program to WSL, or cmd and powershell, the conhost console layer of Windows interferes with escape sequence controls; even for WSL, it does not pass them through transparently but imposes its own idea of terminal capabilities, mangling basic controls like bold and reverse attributes, so bold text is enforced to appear white. This broken behaviour was fixed for Windows 11 but not back-ported to Windows 10.

You can however fix the issue by updating your conhost layer to its update as distributed with the Windows Terminal project. From the release area, among the Assets, download the WindowsTerminalPreview zip file of your architecture, extract its OpenConsole.exe, rename it to conhost.exe and replace the conhost program in your Windows System32 folder with it. (Do not copy conhost.exe from Windows 11 into Windows 10.)

The same workaround handles interrupt signals, particularly Control+C, which does not otherwise function as expected with non-cygwin programs.

Some applications, often text editors, want to know which terminal they are running in, in order to make use of terminal-specific features that are not indicated by the terminfo/termcap mechanism.

The most reliable way to determine the terminal type is to use the Secondary Device Attributes report queried from the terminal. The script terminal in the mintty utils repository provides an implementation.

In addition, from mintty 3.1.5, an additional escape sequence causes mintty to report its name and version; furthermore, although using environment variables for this purpose is not reliable (see issue #776 for a discussion), mintty sets environment variables TERM_PROGRAM and TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION as various other terminals do.

Terminal line settings can be viewed or changed with the stty utility, which is installed as part of Cygwin’s core utilities package. Among other things, it can set the control characters used for generating signals or editing an input line.

See the stty manual for all the details, but here are a few examples. The commands can be included in shell startup files to make them permanent.

To change the key for deleting a whole word from Ctrl+W to Ctrl+Backspace, you could assign the ^_ control character to the Ctrl+Backarrow key:

KeyFunctions=C+Back:"^_"

and apply the following terminal line setting:

stty werase '^_'

To use Pause and Break instead of Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+C for suspending or interrupting a process:

stty susp '^]' swtch '^]' intr '^\'

With these settings, the Esc key can also be used to interrupt processes by setting its keycode to ^\:

echo -ne '\e[?7728h'

(The standard escape character ^[ cannot be used for that purpose because it appears as the first character in many keycodes.)

Unix terminal line drivers have a flow control feature that allow terminal output to be stopped with Ctrl+S and restarted with Ctrl+Q. However, due to the scrollback feature in modern terminal emulators, there is little need for this. Hence, to make those key combinations available for other uses, disable flow control with this command (note that screen-oriented programs like text editors will typically manage this setting themselves):

stty -ixon

Keyboard input for the bash shell and other programs that use the readline library can be configured with the so-called inputrc file. Unless overridden by setting the INPUTRC variable, this is located at ~/.inputrc. It consists of bindings of keycodes to readline commands, whereby comments start with a hash character. See its manual for details.

Anyone used to Windows key combinations for editing text might find the following bindings useful:

# Ctrl+Right / Ctrl+Left to move by whole words
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word

# Ctrl+Delete / Ctrl+Backarrow to delete whole words
"\e[3;5~": kill-word
"\C-_": backward-kill-word      # with mintty setting KeyFunctions=C+Back:"^_"

# Ctrl+Shift+Delete to delete to end of the line
"\e[3;6~": kill-line

# Ctrl+Shift+Backarrow to delete to start of the line
"\e[72;6~": backward-kill-line  # with mintty setting KeyFunctions=CS+Back:72

# Alt-Backarrow for undo
"\e\d": undo                    # would be disabled by DECSET 67 sequence

Finally, a couple of bindings for convenient searching of the command history. Just enter the first few characters of a previous command and press Ctrl+Up to look it up.

# Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down for searching command history
"\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
"\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

To add interactive protection from injected commands, the readline feature enable-bracketed-paste makes use of bracketed-paste mode to present multi-line commands for confirmation before running them. It should not be combined with skip-csi-sequence however which is buggy as of bash 4.4.12 / readline 7.0.3.

set enable-bracketed-paste on
# do not map "\e[": skip-csi-sequence

If for example the PgUp and PgDn keys do not work in your editor, the reason may be that in the mintty Options, the Terminal Type was set to "vt100" and based on the resulting setting of the environment variable TERM, the application expects other key sequences than mintty sends. (While mintty could be changed to send VT100 application keypad codes in that case, the current behaviour is compatible with xterm.)

If you configure the Backarrow key to send a Backspace character rather than the Linux default DEL character (setting BackspaceSendsBS=yes), emacs will not be able to recognize an explicit Ctrl+h command anymore. It is recommended to leave this setting at its default.

The escape sequences for Shift+up/down are mapped to scroll-backward/forward virtual keys by the xterm terminfo entry. Follow the advice in How to fix emacs shift-up key... to create a fixed terminfo entry that removes this mapping, or use a suitable alternative setting for the environment variable TERM, for example TERM=xterm-color.

Mintty supports control sequences for changing cursor style. These can be used to configure vim such that the cursor changes depending on mode. For example, with the following lines in ~/.vimrc, vim will show a block cursor in normal mode and a line cursor in insert mode:

let &t_ti.="\e[1 q"
let &t_SI.="\e[5 q"
let &t_EI.="\e[1 q"
let &t_te.="\e[0 q"

Before vim 8.1.0566, full mouse mode is not automatically enabled in mintty. Add this to ~/.vimrc for a workaround:

set mouse=a
if has("mouse_sgr")
    set ttymouse=sgr
else
    set ttymouse=xterm2
end

Some applications may reset cursor style, especially cursor blinking, after terminating, caused by the terminfo database including the corresponding reset sequence in the “normal cursor” setting. This is avoided with mintty option SuppressDEC=12, not needed from mintty 3.0.1.

It’s a historical flaw of Unix terminals that the keycode of the escape key, i.e. the escape character, also appears at the start of many other keycodes. This means that on seeing an escape character, an application cannot be sure whether to treat it as an escape key press or whether to expect more characters to complete a longer keycode.

Therefore they tend to employ a timeout to decide. The delay on the escape key can be annoying though, particularly with the mode-dependent cursor above enabled. The timeout approach can also fail on slow connections or a heavily loaded machine.

Mintty’s “application escape key mode” can be used to avoid this by switching the escape key to an unambiguous keycode. Add the following to ~/.vimrc to employ it in vim:

let &t_ti.="\e[?7727h"
let &t_te.="\e[?7727l"
noremap <Esc>O[ <Esc>
noremap! <Esc>O[ <Esc>

Note that the last line causes vi-compatible behaviour to be used when pressing Esc on the command line: the command is executed rather than cancelled as is the default for vim. If the latter is preferred, replace the last line with a mapping to ^C:

noremap! <Esc>O[ <C-c>

Windows provides AltGr using two virtual key codes (Ctrl and Menu) sharing the same timestamp. TeamViewer is buggy with respect to the timestamp. As a workaround, mintty can detect AltGr also from the two key codes arriving with some delay. Setting CtrlAltDelayAltGr=16 or CtrlAltDelayAltGr=20 is suggested.

Hot Keyboard needs configuration CtrlAltIsAltGr=1 and SupportExternalHotkeys=4 as a workaround for buggy behaviour. Also ClipShortcuts=true (default) is advisable.

The Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab key combinations can be used to switch windows/panes/tabs in a terminal multiplexer session. In order to do so, their use as shortcuts for switching mintty windows needs to be disabled on the Keys page of the options, and their keycodes need to be mapped as shown below.

For GNU Screen, in ~/.screenrc:

bindkey "^[[1;5I" next
bindkey "^[[1;6I" prev

For tmux, in ~/.tmux.conf:

set -s user-keys[0] "\e[1;5I"
set -s user-keys[1] "\e[1;6I"
bind-key -n User0 next-window
bind-key -n User1 previous-window

A number of options are available to customize the keyboard behaviour, including user-defined function and keypad keys and Ctrl+Shift+key shortcuts. See the manual page for options and details about

• Backspace/DEL behaviour
• AltGr and other modifiers
• shortcut assignments
• special key assignments
• user-definable key functions

See also the Keycodes wiki page.

By default, mintty sends ^? (ASCII DEL) as the keycode for the Backarrow key. This is the Linux default (as opposed to sending ^H which was the default in many Unix environments). This can be changed with setting BackspaceSendsBS=yes. The tty setting ERASE character will be aligned accordingly (see man termios and command stty erase).

Mind that this may affect certain applications, for example emacs which cannot interpret the explicit Control+h command anymore.

If both settings CtrlShiftShortcuts and CtrlExchangeShift are enabled, copy & paste functions are assigned to plain (unshifted) Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for those who prefer them to be handled like in Windows.

It’s also possible to assign user-defined functions to modified character keys with setting KeyFunctions; however, redefining control character assignment (e.g. Control+C) or Alt-modified characters (prefixing them with ESC) is not supported by default. This would disable basic terminal features and may result in users „shooting themselves in the foot“; overriding this protection is possible by setting ShootFoot.

Finally, it’s also possible to define Control+V as a paste function independently of the terminal; add the following to your .bashrc file:

paste () {
  CLIP=$(cat /dev/clipboard)
  COUNT=$(echo -n "$CLIP" | wc -c)
  READLINE_LINE="${READLINE_LINE:0:$READLINE_POINT}${CLIP}${READLINE_LINE:$READLINE_POINT}"
  READLINE_POINT=$(($READLINE_POINT + $COUNT))
}
bind -x '"\C-v": paste'

and the following to your .inputrc file:

set bind-tty-special-chars off

Mintty uses the Windows keyboard layout system with its “dead key” mechanism for entering accented characters, enhanced by self-composed characters for dead-key combinations that Windows does not support (e.g. ẃ).

Mintty also provides a Compose key, using X11 compose data. It is configurable to Control, Shift, Alt, Super or Hyper, or CapsLock, or to any key combination with user-definable function compose in setting KeyFunctions. For example, if the Compose key is configured to be Control, pressing and releasing the Control key, followed by letters a and e, will enter æ; Control---, will enter ¬, Control-C-o will enter ©, Control-<-< will enter «, Control-c-, will enter ç, Control-s-s will enter ß, Control-!-! will enter ¡, Control-!-? will enter ‽, etc.

The user-definable function compose can be used to assign the Compose function to other keys, e.g.

• KeyFunctions=CapsLock:compose
• KeyFunctions=NumLock:compose

For a separate compose key solution, the most seamless and stable Compose Key for Windows is WinCompose.

The default foreground, background and cursor colours can be changed in the options dialog, or by specifying the ForegroundColour, BackgroundColour and CursorColour settings in the configuration file or on the command line.

However, they can also be changed from within the terminal using the xterm control sequences for this purpose, for example:

echo -ne '\e]10;#000000\a'  # Black foreground
echo -ne '\e]11;#C0C0C0\a'  # Light gray background
echo -ne '\e]12;#00FF00\a'  # Green cursor

In mintty, the RGB colour values can also be specified using a comma-separated decimal notation, for example 255,0,0 instead of #FF0000 for red. X11 colour names are supported, too. See the examples below for all options.

The 16 ANSI colours can be set in the configuration file or on the command line using settings such as Blue or BoldMagenta. These are documented in the configuration section of the manual. They can also be changed using xterm control sequences. Here they are with their default values:

echo -ne '\e]4;0;#000000\a'   # black
echo -ne '\e]4;1;#BF0000\a'   # red
echo -ne '\e]4;2;#00BF00\a'   # green
echo -ne '\e]4;3;#BFBF00\a'   # yellow
echo -ne '\e]4;4;#0000BF\a'   # blue
echo -ne '\e]4;5;#BF00BF\a'   # magenta
echo -ne '\e]4;6;#00BFBF\a'   # cyan
echo -ne '\e]4;7;#BFBFBF\a'   # white (light grey really)
echo -ne '\e]4;8;#404040\a'   # bold black (i.e. dark grey)
echo -ne '\e]4;9;#FF4040\a'   # bold red
echo -ne '\e]4;10;#40FF40\a'  # bold green
echo -ne '\e]4;11;#FFFF40\a'  # bold yellow
echo -ne '\e]4;12;#6060FF\a'  # bold blue
echo -ne '\e]4;13;#FF40FF\a'  # bold magenta
echo -ne '\e]4;14;#40FFFF\a'  # bold cyan
echo -ne '\e]4;15;#FFFFFF\a'  # bold white

Different notations are accepted for colour specifications:

• #RRGGBB (256 hex values, see examples above)
• rrr,ggg,bbb (256 decimal values)
• rgb:RR/GG/BB (256 hex values)
• rgb:RRRR/GGGG/BBBB (65536 hex values)
• cmy:C.C/M.M/Y.Y (float values between 0 and 1)
• cmyk:C.C/M.M/Y.Y/K.K (float values between 0 and 1)
• color-name (using X11 color names, e.g. echo -ne '\e]10;bisque2\a')

Colour schemes (that redefine ANSI colours and possibly foreground/background colours) can be loaded with the option -C (capital C) or --loadconfig which loads a configuration file read-only, i.e. configuration changes are not saved to this file, or with setting ThemeFile.

In the Options menu, section Looks, the Theme popup offers theme files as stored in a resource directory for selection. This dialog field (or the “Color Scheme Designer” button for drag-and-drop) can be used in different ways:

• Popup the selection to choose a theme configured in your resource directory
• Insert a file name (e.g. by pasting or drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer)
• Download a theme file from the Internet (may be embedded in HTML page)
• Download a generated theme from the Color Scheme Designer (see below)
• Drag-and-drop a theme directly from a link as supported on some sites

The default theme (since 3.6.0) is helmholtz which provides a colour scheme of well-balanced appearance and luminance; see the comments in the theme file about its crafting principles.

Downloaded theme files may either be installed in a resource directory or copied into the dialog field and saved when you decide to keep them: After drag-and-drop of a colour scheme, it is automatically applied to the current terminal session for quick and easy testing; to keep the scheme in your popup selection, assign a name to it by typing it into the Theme field, then click the “Store” button. After downloading a theme file, the name will be filled with its basename as a suggestion. As long as a colour scheme is loaded but not yet stored, and a name is available in the Theme field, the “Store” button will be enabled.

A number of colour schemes have been published for mintty, also mintty supports direct drag-and-drop import of theme files in iTerm2 format, Windows terminal format, or JSON-embedded mintty format. Look for the following repositories:

• https://iterm2colorschemes.com/
• https://github.com/oumu/mintty-color-schemes
• https://github.com/goreliu/wsl-terminal/tree/master/src/etc/themes
• 4bit Terminal Color Scheme Designer

The 4bit Terminal Color Scheme Designer lets you nicely craft and tune a colour scheme in various dimensions (like hue, saturation, lightness) that affect colours consistently. Select “Download Scheme” – “mintty” for the mintty format.

Mintty also provides the command-line script mintheme which can display the themes available in the mintty configuration directories or activate one of them in the current mintty window.

Note that some theme files also define foreground/background or cursor colours, which overrides manually changed settings of those. If you do not want that, simply make a copy of the theme file with those settings removed.

As an alternative to a background colour, mintty also supports graphic background. This can be configured with the option Background or set dynamically using special syntax of the colour background OSC sequence. The respective parameter addresses an image file, preceded by a mode prefix and optionally followed by a transparency value. Prefixes are:

• * use image file as tiled background
• _ (optional with option Background) use image as picture background, scaled to window
• % use image as picture background and scale window to its aspect ratio
• = use desktop background (if tiled and unscaled), for a virtual floating window

If the background filename is followed by a comma and a number between 1 and 254, the background image will be dimmed towards the background colour; with a value of 255, the alpha transparency values of the image will be used.

Examples:

Background=C:\cygwin64\usr\share\backgrounds\tiles\rough_paper.png
-o Background='C:\cygwin64\usr\share\backgrounds\tiles\rough_paper.png'
echo -ne '\e]11;*/usr/share/backgrounds/tiles/rough_paper.png\a'
echo -ne '\e]11;_pontneuf.png,99\a'
echo -ne '\e]11;=,99\a'

Note that relative pathnames depend on proper detection of the current directory of the foreground process. Note that absolute pathnames within the cygwin file system are likely not to work among different cygwin installations. To configure a background in $APPDATA/mintty/config (or %APPDATA%/wsltty/config), Windows pathname syntax should be used.

To provide additional fonts for use with mintty, monospace fonts can be installed in Windows. Note that font installation in X11 does not make a font available for mintty as mintty is not an X windows application. Some monospace fonts are not explicitly marked as such in the font file. In that case the font will not be listed in the mintty Options – Text – Font selection menu. It can still be used by explicit selection, e.g.:

mintty -o Font="Linux Libertine Mono"

Also, Unicode font names are now supported, e.g.

mintty -o Font=Sütterlin
mintty -o Font=옹달샘

The font selection menu lists monospace fonts unless marked to Hide in the Fonts folder of the system Control Panel. To include them in the fonts offered in the menu (e.g. to select any of DotumChe, GulimChe, GungsuhChe, MingLiU, MS Gothic, MS Mincho, NSimSun, Simplified Arabic Fixed), do either of:

• Uncheck “Hide fonts based on language settings” in Fonts ▸ Font settings
• Hide/Show fonts individually from their context menu
• Set the mintty hidden setting ShowHiddenFonts=true

The latter setting also includes fonts with an OEM or SYMBOL character set.

Some fonts with a name problem (e.g. Meslo LG S for Powerline) can be selected using the new Apply button in the font selection menu.

Fonts not listed in the menu can be configured with the Font setting.

The old font selection and menu format can be chosen with setting FontMenu=1.

If you are missing certain characters, e.g. as used for the popular “Powerline” plugin, the reason may be that specifically designed characters are being addressed that are provided in the Unicode Private Use range of dedicated fonts; a collection of such fonts can be found at Nerd Fonts.

Mintty supports up to 10 alternative fonts that can be selected as character attributes (see Text attributes below). They are configured in the config file (see manual page), except for font 10 which has a default preference; mintty will try to find a Fraktur or Blackletter font for it on your system.

Mintty can select alternative fonts for specific Unicode script ranges. With this feature, you can e.g. use a different font for CJK characters.

Script names are as specified in the Unicode file Scripts.txt, listed in wiki: Unicode scripts column "Alias".

A special name is CJK which comprises Han, Hangul, Katakana, Hiragana, Bopomofo, Kanbun, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (except Latin). A later more specific entry will override an earlier one (see CJK example below).

Configuration example:

FontChoice=Hebrew:6;Arabic:7;CJK:5;Han:8;Hangul:9
Font6=David
Font7=Simplified Arabic Fixed
Font5=Malgun Gothic
Font8=FangSong
Font9=MingLiU

Another special name is PictoSymbols to assign an alternative font to ranges of pictographic symbols, including arrows, mathematical and technical symbols, shapes, dingbats, emoticons etc. Configuration example:

FontChoice=PictoSymbols:2
Font2=DejaVu Sans Mono

Finally, special name Private covers the Private Use ranges, which are often used for additional icon symbols (e.g. by "Nerd Fonts" or "Powerline" fonts). Configuration example:

FontChoice=Private:3
Font3=MesloLGS NF

Note that in addition to Unicode scripts, also Unicode blocks can be used to specify a secondary font, by a "|" prefix to the block name, with block specifications preceding over the more general script specifications.

FontChoice=Greek:3;|Greek Extended:4

For Box Drawing characters (U+2500..U+257F), most fonts do not provide proper glyphs for seamless box drawing. The following font configuration would fix that. However, option BoxDrawing (default on) overrides this and lets mintty draw box drawing characters itself.

FontChoice=|Box Drawing:3
Font3=DejaVu Sans Mono
BoxDrawing=no

Mintty supports on-the-fly temporary font installation, especially for use in a portable terminal application. Place font files into the subdirectory fonts of the mintty configuration directory. All will be made available for mintty usage, there is currently no mechanism to configure dynamic fonts explicitly. The number of font files should be limited to avoid significant startup delay. To avoid having to set up an explicit --configdir invocation parameter, fonts can be placed in the /usr/share/mintty/fonts folder of the portable installation.

By default, mintty adjusts character width to the width assumption of the locale mechanism (function wcwidth). Character width can be modified by a number of configuration or dynamic settings:

• Locale: change locale, stays consistent with system locales
• Charwidth=unicode: use built-in rather than system-provided Unicode data
• Charwidth: further options to handle double-width characters
• Charset: may affect CJK ambiguous-width handling if used with Locale
• Font: may affect CJK ambiguous-width handling if locale support fails
• PrintableControls: makes C1 or C0 control characters visible (width 1)
• OSC 701: changes locale/charset, may affect ambiguous width handling
• OSC 50: changes font, may affect ambiguous width handling (with Locale)
• OSC 77119: turns some character ranges to wide characters
• PEC: explicit character width attribute

See the mintty manual and Control Sequences for more details.

Note that with any of these settings, actual width properties as rendered on the screen and width assumptions of the wcwidth function will be inconsistent then for the impacted characters, which may confuse screen applications (such as editors) that rely on wcwidth information.

A number of Unicode characters have an “ambiguous width” property due to legacy issues with dedicated CJK fonts, meaning they can be narrow (single-cell width) or wide (double-cell width) in a terminal.

To select ambiguous-width characters to appear wide (as some applications may expect), mintty should be run in a CJK locale (character encoding does not need to be CJK), e.g.:

LC_CTYPE=zh_SG.utf8 mintty &

If the locale is selected via the Locale setting, however, it is necessary to choose an ambiguous-wide font in addition (CJK font), or mintty will enforce the ambiguous-narrow mode of rendering by appending the “@cjknarrow” locale modifier:

mintty -o Locale=zh_CN -o Font=FangSong &

If it is not desired to set a specific base locale in order to enable ambiguous-wide mode, option Charwidth=ambig-wide can be used. It implies Charwidth=unicode behaviour, with the same caveats as above. Mintty indicates this mode by appending the @cjkwide modifier to the LC_CTYPE locale variable.

Single-width CJK character rendering can be enforced, with proper glyph scaling, with settings Charwidth=single or Charwidth=single-unicode, following a proposal in the Terminals Working Group Specifications. Mintty indicates this mode by appending the @cjksingle modifier to the LC_CTYPE locale variable.

After remote login, locale definitions of remote and local systems may differ, mostly about existing locales and ambiguous width properties. This is particularly the case if

• the cygwin locale includes a @cjk... modifier which is not supported on other systems
• the cygwin locale is a CJK locale with UTF-8 encoding in cygwin before 3.2.0 (which makes ambiguous width narrow for all UTF-8 locales to be consistent with other systems)

The script localejoin in the mintty utils repository adjusts these mismatches by switching the terminal locale temporarily and thus joining its width properties with those of typical remote systems. Direct invocation of the script just runs a shell with a locale setting. To use it for direct remote invocation, install it under the name containing any of the remote login programs (rsh, rlogin, rexec, telnet, ssh). Example (with localejoin renamed/linked/copied as minssh):

• minssh myLinuxhost

While mintty fully supports double-width characters (esp. CJK) as well as ambiguous-width characters, there are also characters of fuzzy width property, because their rendered glyph is wider than one terminal character cell in most fonts, but yet they are defined as single-width by Unicode. Such characters often appear to be clipped on the screen. Mintty has an experimental feature to display semi-wide Indic and some other characters at double-cell width (see Control Sequences – Wide characters), but not all such characters are handled, and there is no perfect solution that would also comply with the locale mechanism unless the terminal would support proportional fonts.

For symbol characters and emojis that are single-width by definition (e.g. locale) but visually double-width, double-width display is supported if the character is followed by an adjacent single-width space character.

Mintty can make use of advanced Windows font fallback as provided via the Uniscribe API, achieving improved character/glyph substitution for characters not provided in the selected font. Option -o FontRender=uniscribe is now the default, -o FontRender=textout disables it. Note that Uniscribe is not applied to right-to-left text as it would interfere with mintty’s own bidi transformation.

The actual window size is influenced by several parameters:

• Font size / character height is the main parameter to determine the row height.
• Row height is additionally affected by the “leading” information from the font.
• Automatic row height adjustment method can be selected by setting AutoLeading.
• Row height and column width can furthermore be tuned with setting RowSpacing and ColSpacing.
• A gap between text and window border can be specified with setting Padding (default 1).

Note: The term “leading” (pronounced like “ledding”) comes from the times of metal typesetting when strips of lead (the metal) were used to adjust line spacing.

Mintty supports a maximum of usual and unusual text attributes, settable with “Select Graphic Rendition” (SGR) escape sequences. For underline styles and some other values, colon-separated ECMA-48 sub-parameters are supported.

Note: Alternative fonts are configured with options Font1 ... Font10. They can also be dynamically changed with OSC sequence 50 which refers to the respectively selected font attribute.

Note: The control sequence for alternative font 1 overrides the identical control sequence to select the VGA character set. Configuring alternative font 1 is therefore discouraged. Note, on the other hand, that the VGA character set control sequence SGR 11 (effective if Font1 is not configured) is not reset with SGR 0 but only with SGR 10.

Note: The control sequences for Fraktur (“Gothic”) font are described in ECMA-48, see also wiki:ANSI code. To use this feature, it is suggested to install F25 Blackletter Typewriter, e.g. from:

• https://www.dafont.com/f25-blacklettertypewriter.font
• https://fontmeme.com/fonts/f25-blackletter-typewriter-font/

Note: RGB colour values are scaled to a maximum of 255 (=100%). CMY(K) colour values are scaled to a maximum of the given parameter F (=100%).

Note: The emoji style attribute sets the display preference for a number of characters that have emojis but would be displayed with text style by default (e.g. decimal digits).

Note: Text attributes can be disabled with option SuppressSGR (see manual).

Note: Combined SGR 73;74 results in small characters at normal position. This does not apply to the alternative DEC private SGRs ?4 and ?5.

As a fancy add-on feature for text attributes, mintty supports distinct (colour) attributes for combining characters, so a combined character can be displayed in multiple colours. Attributes considered for this purpose are default and ANSI foreground colours, palette and true-colour foreground colours, dim mode and manual bold mode (BoldAsFont=false), and blinking; background colours and inverse mode are ignored.

Mintty supports display of emojis as defined by Unicode using emoji presentation, emoji style variation and emoji sequences. (Note that the tty must be in a UTF-8 locale to support emoji codes.) Extended flag emojis (not listed by Unicode) are supported dynamically.

The option Emojis can choose among sets of emoji graphics if deployed in a mintty configuration directory. With this option, mintty emoji support is enabled and the emoji graphics style is chosen. Mintty will match output for valid emoji sequences, emoji style selectors and emoji presentation forms.

For characters with default text style but optional emoji graphics, emoji style can be selected with the “framed” or “encircled” text attribute.

Note that up to cygwin 2.10.0, it may be useful to set Charwidth=unicode in addition.

Emojis are displayed in the rectangular character cell group determined by the cumulated width of the emoji sequence characters. The option EmojiPlacement can adjust the location of emoji graphics within that area. You can use the escape sequence PEC to tune emoji width.

Mintty does not bundle actual emoji graphics with its package. You will have to download and deploy them yourself. Expert options are described here, see also the next section for a Quick Guide to emoji installation.

Emoji data can be found at the following sources:

• Unicode.org Full Emoji List (~50MB)
  • Use the script getemojis to download the web pages Full Emoji List and Full Emoji Modifier Sequences (with all emoji data embedded) and extract emoji data (call it without parameters for instructions)
  • Deploy the subdirectories common and google
  • Used to include apple, emojione, facebook, google, twitter, samsung, windows emojis, now only provides google style
• OpenMoji
  • Under “Get OpenMojis”, download the “PNG Color 72×72” archive (or the very large resolution if preferred)
  • Unpack the archive into openmoji
• Noto Emoji font, subdirectory png/128
  • “Clone or download” the repository or download a release archive
  • Deploy subdirectory noto-emoji/png/128 as noto
• JoyPixels (formerly EmojiOne)
  • Download JoyPixels Free (or Premium)
  • Deploy the preferred subdirectory (e.g. png/unicode/128) as joypixels
• Emoji data and images has a mix of recent and outdated emoji sets of styles apple, facebook, google, twitter. Check out yourself.
• Zoom (with an installed Zoom meeting client)
  • Deploy $APPDATA/Zoom/data/Emojis/*.png into zoom

Emoji flags graphics (extending Unicode) can be found at the following sources:

• Google region flags

• Puellanivis’ emoji flags

  • Use the script getflags to download the repositories and extract emoji data (call it without parameters for instructions).
  • Deploy common/*.png into common

To “Clone” with limited download volume, use the command git clone --depth 1. To download only the desired subdirectory from github.com, use subversion, for example:

• svn export https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/trunk/png/128 noto
• svn export https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data/trunk/img-apple-160 apple

“Deploy” above means move, link, copy or hard-link the respective subdirectory into mintty configuration resource subdirectory emojis, e.g.

• mv noto-emoji/png/128 ~/.config/mintty/emojis/noto
• ln -s "$PWD"/noto-emoji/png/128 ~/.config/mintty/emojis/noto
• cp -rl noto-emoji/png/128 ~/.config/mintty/emojis/noto

Use your preferred configuration directory, e.g.

• cp -rl noto-emoji/png/128 "$APPDATA"/mintty/emojis/noto
• cp -rl noto-emoji/png/128 /usr/share/mintty/emojis/noto

In the cygwin or MSYS2 mintty packages, the emoji download and deployment scripts are installed in /usr/share/mintty/emojis, so do this for a common all-users deployment of the emojis listed at Unicode.org and the flags emojis:

• cd /usr/share/mintty/emojis
• ./getemojis -d
• ./getflags -de

You may also use the scripts for deployment in your preferred config directory.

To deploy in your personal local resource folder:

• mkdir -p ~/.config/mintty/emojis; cd ~/.config/mintty/emojis
• /usr/share/mintty/emojis/getemojis -d
• /usr/share/mintty/emojis/getflags -de

To deploy in your personal common resource folder (shared e.g. by cygwin/MSYS2):

• mkdir -p "$APPDATA"/mintty/emojis; cd "$APPDATA"/mintty/emojis
• /usr/share/mintty/emojis/getemojis -d
• /usr/share/mintty/emojis/getflags -de

With the Search menu command or Alt+F3, a search bar is opened. Matching is case-insensitive and ignores combining characters. Matches are highlighted in the scrollback buffer. The appearance of the search bar and the matching highlight colours can be customized.

Another search feature (Shift+cursor-left/right) skips to the previous/next prompt line if these are marked with scroll marker escape sequences, see the CtrlSeqs wiki page.

Character encoding (or character set) is normally determined via the locale mechanism. To run mintty in a specific locale case-by-case, you would set the LC_CTYPE locale category (using environment variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG in this precedence) to configure both mintty and its child process (shell) consistently, for example:

LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.gbk mintty &

However, as a legacy option, it is also possible to configure mintty with distinct options Locale and Charset; note that despite the name, the Locale parameter must not include an encoding suffix in this case. Note that combining Locale with an empty Charset setting results in the implicit character encoding as defined by the respective locale without suffix, which is not UTF-8 in most cases and may be unexpected. Take care to make sure that the child process has the same idea about the character encoding as the terminal in this scenario.

Mintty has special support for the GB18030 character encoding which is not supported by cygwin and therefore not available for interactive configuration of the Charset setting in the Options dialog. Setting Charset=GB18030 in a config file or on the command line invokes this support (setting Locale too is necessary). Mintty will fallback to the GBK character encoding for the locale setup of its child process in this case, to provide at least consistence with a maximum subset of GB18030. GB18030 is fully supported for terminal output/input. Example:

mintty -o Locale=zh_CN -o Charset=GB18030 &

Add setting -o Charwidth=ambig-wide if desired.

If mintty is used as a WSL terminal, the WSL side can be configured to run a GB18030 locale as well to achieve full GB18030 support.

mintty --WSL[=...] -o Locale=zh_CN -o Charset=GB18030

To pass non-ASCII parameters to a command run from mintty using a specific character encoding, proper conversion must be crafted. See issue #463 for a discussion. For example, for a desktop shortcut to start a GBK-encoded mintty starting in a specific directory with a non-ASCII name, use this command line as a shortcut target:

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -o Locale=C -o Charset=GBK /bin/bash -l -c "cd `echo D:/桌面 | iconv -f UTF-8`; exec bash"

So the initial shell, interpreting its cd parameters already in GBK encoding, will see it properly converted.

With Alt+F2, normally another mintty window would be opened in the home directory (or where the current window was started), while it may be desirable to open it in the same directory as the current working directory. This can be achieved with some interaction between the shell and the terminal, as applied e.g. by the Mac Terminal. The shell can inform the terminal about a changed directory with the OSC 7 control sequence (see the CtrlSeqs wiki page), to be output with the prompt (example for bash):

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\e]7;$PWD\a" ; '"$PROMPT_COMMAND"

The sequence could also be output by shell aliases or functions changing the directory. It cannot be embedded in the prompt itself with \w as that is using some shortcuts, but $PWD could be used if shopt promptvars is not unset.

Note that after remote login, the directory path may be meaningless unless the remote and local paths match. Note also that from a login terminal (e.g. using parameter - to start a login shell), Alt+F2 starts again a login terminal, whose login shell is likely to reset the working directory to the home directory.

The Virtual Tabs feature provides a list of all running mintty sessions as well as configurable launch parameters for new sessions. The session list is shown when right-clicking the title bar (if virtual tabs mode is configured or with Ctrl) or ctrl+left-clicking it. By default, the list is also shown in the extended context menu (Ctrl+right-click), the mouse button 5 menu, and the menus opened with the Ctrl+Menu key and the Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut (if enabled). (Menu contents for the various context menu invocations is configurable.) For configuration, see settings SessionCommands, Menu*, and SessionGeomSync. Distinct sets of sessions can be set up with the setting -o Class=.... For flexible window grouping, this setting supports the same placeholders as the AppID option.

Tabs can also be switched from a tabbar, activated with setting Tabbar to a recommended value of 2 or more (use 4 or 9 for maximal tab synchronization).

Tabs can be reordered with user-definable functions tab-left, tab-right. For example to use keys Alt+Win+Left/Right:

KeyFunctions=AW+Left:tab-left;AW+Right:tab-right

Mintty supports multiple monitors with two features:

A mintty window can be placed on a specific monitor with the command-line option -p @N where N is the number of the monitor.

A new mintty window cloned with Alt+F2 can be placed on a selected monitor while F2 is being held; press cursor and other keys on the numeric keypad to navigate the monitor grid to the desired target monitor, then release F2.

Note also the generic Windows hotkeys to move the current window to the left or right neighbour monitor: Win+Shift+cursor-left/right.

Mintty supports both Sixel graphics and image graphics output (see below).

The Sixel feature facilitates a range of applications that integrate graphic images in the terminal, animated graphics, and even video and interactive gaming applications.

An example is the output of gnuplot with the command

export GNUTERM=sixel
gnuplot -e "splot [x=-3:3] [y=-3:3] sin(x) * cos(y)"

Note that gnuplot uses black text on default background for captions and coordinates so better not run it in a terminal with dark background.

In addition to the legacy Sixel feature, mintty supports graphic image display (using iTerm2 controls). Image formats supported comprise PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, Exif.

The script showimg in the mintty utils repository supports interactive image display.

Mintty can emulate the Tektronix 4014 vector graphics terminal. It switches to Tek emulation on the xterm sequence DECSET 38 (\e[?38h). It is suggested to adjust the window size to the Tektronix 4010 resolution and aspect ratio before:

• echo -en "\e[4;780;1024t"

The script tek in the mintty utils repository supports switching to Tek mode and optional output of Tek plot files. It also sets the environment variables TERM and GNUTERM properly. When leaving the sub-shell, it restores DEC/ANSI terminal mode.

Mintty facilitates localization of its user interface, the Options dialog, menus, message boxes, and terminal in-line error messages. The localization language can be selected with the option Language, see manual page for details.

Example: Assume setting Language=*, environment variables LANGUAGE=de_CH:français:de:fr_FR and LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8, environment variable LC_ALL not set: mintty tries to find localization files (in this order) for de_CH, français, de, fr_FR, en_GB, then (as generic fallback) fr and en, each in all resource configuration folders (subfolder lang).

Note that Windows may already have localized the default entries of the system menu, which makes the system menu language inconsistent because mintty adds a few items here. Choose Language=en or en_US to “reverse-localize” this, as well as the font and colour chooser dialogs. Choose Language=en_US to change Colour to Color in the menus.

Localization files for various language or language/region codes are looked up in the resource configuration folders, subfolder lang. Mintty uses a simplified gettext file format but not the gettext library; all messages must be encoded in UTF-8, the Content-Type charset is ignored.

To add a new language, copy messages.pot to the desired .po file (including a region suffix if appropriate, like fr_CH) and add the msgstr entries which are empty in the template. The tool poedit may be used but remember to use UTF-8 encoding. Check the translations for strings that may be too long and get clipped by a careful walkthrough of the Options dialog, opening all popups and sub-dialogs (colours and font) and also checking mintty -o FontMenu=0.

Note: For setting values in popup menus of some of the options in the Options dialog, localization is also supported. Note however that the corresponding values in the config file or on the command line must not be localized, so apparent inconsistencies may arise. It is therefore suggested not to localize these values (marked “(localization optional)” in the localization template messages.pot).

Note: There is one special pseudo-string in the localization template which facilitates scaling of the Options dialog width. It is labelled “__ Options: dialog width scale factor (80...200)” and its template value is “100”. If you provide a pseudo-translated value between 80 and 200 for it, the Options dialog width will be scaled by that percentage. (The navigation panel remains unscaled.)

Note that & marks in menu item labels define keyboard shortcuts to be handled by Windows. The script keycheck with your .po file as parameter checks for ambiguous shortcut entries; these are not errors but you may consider to reduce ambiguities. Note that a future (or currently patched) version of the uniq tool is needed to cover non-ASCII keyboard shortcuts.

Diagnostic display of current character information can be toggled from the extended context menu (Ctrl+right-click).

• Unicode character codes at the current cursor position will then be displayed in the window title bar. (Note that mintty may precompose a combining character sequence into a combined character which is then displayed.)
• Unicode character names will be included in the display if the unicode-ucd package is installed in /usr/share (or the file charnames.txt generated by the mintty script src/mknames is installed in the mintty resource subfolder info).
• Emoji sequence “short names” will be indicated if Emojis display is enabled. Note that the “normal” window title setting sequence and the character information output simply overwrite each other.

Mintty supports a few extension features:

• Application-specific drag-and-drop transformations (option DropCommands)
• User-defined commands and filters for context menu (option UserCommands)
• User-defined functions for key combinations (option KeyFunctions)
• User-defined function entries for system menu (option SysMenuFunctions)

See the manual page for details.

As an example for a user-defined command, that is not used for filtering text in this case, assume the user wants a menu option to terminate the terminal foreground process (in case it is stalled). This can be done by including a user command:

UserCommands=Kill foreground process:kill -9 $MINTTY_PID

With option ExitCommands, a set of strings (likely control strings) can be defined to be sent to the respective foreground application if the window is instructed to "Close" from its menu or close button.

Note: Detection of terminal foreground processes works only locally; this features does not work with WSL or after remote login.

Note: This feature potentially makes mintty vulnerable against command injection. Be careful what strings you configure!

Example:

ExitCommands=bash:exit^M;mined:^[q;emacs:^X^C

To install mintty outside a cygwin environment, follow a few rules:

• Compile mintty statically.
• Install mintty.exe together with cygwin1.dll and cygwin-console-helper.exe.
• Call the directory in which to install mintty and libraries bin (optional).
• The parent directory of bin will be considered the mintty root directory.
• Aside the bin directory (in the root directory), install folder tree usr/share/mintty with subdirectories for mintty resources, e.g. lang/*.po, themes/*, sounds/* etc.

To bundle an application which is not natively compiled on cygwin with mintty, cygwin 3.1.0 provides the ConPTY support to bridge the terminal interworking incompatiblity problems (pty incompatibility problem and character encoding incompatibility problem).

For software that is aware of Posix terminal conventions, it may be a feasible solution if the software detects a terminal and its character encoding by checking environment variable TERM and the locale variables and invokes stty raw -echo to enable direct character-based I/O and disable non-compatible signal handling. For this purpose, stty and its library dependencies need to be bundled with the installation as well.

To run WSL, use wslbridge2 as a gateway (see above).