Re: MinTTY

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

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 10:10:33PM +0000, Andy Koppe wrote:
> 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.

That's what I meant by the "console" interface.

>>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.

If you have a captured interface then a windows console could be treated
like a pty.  Getting more than one of these per process would be tricky
though and it might not be capable of being a general pty interface.

>>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.

The fact that windows apps don't like cygwin ptys is why we never made
rxvt the standard interface.  What would be nice is to give the user
some easy way to decide which they want.  We would, of course, still get
people complaining about whichever choice they made, 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.)

Yeah, sorry.  I found out after I sent the email that I'd previously
installed some "nifty" software (Microsoft's intellipoint) which was
interfering with my mouse clicks.  Middle-click wasn't working right.
Now it is.

>>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?

Maybe.  On further thought, it's possible that FreeConsole won't do
the trick either.  A combination of FreeConsole + restarting the
process with CreateProcess might be needed.  Maybe it isn't worth
the effort.

cgf

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