Re: First Pass at mintty documentation

[Andy Koppe <andy dot koppe at gmail dot com>]

Lee D.Rothstein wrote:

> Hi, I've taken a first pass at distilling my experience with
> 'mintty' and the [ahem] discussion, here, about it into a text
> file (see attachment mintty.{h})

Thanks, that's a nice surprise!


> Speed

It's quite funny, I didn't realise that until people here pointed it 
out, probably because I didn't have to do anything to achieve it. :)


>  > Best conformance to my personal expectation of what various
>    directional keys (<HOME>, <END>, <->>, <<->, etc.) should do!
>    (However, still bummed that <CTRL>-<->> & <CTRL>-<<-> do not
>    move, respectively forward and back a word on the command
>    line!)

These two lines in .inputrc should do the trick:

"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\e[1;5C": forward-word

And here's my favourite bash feature, mapped to Ctrl-Up/Down:

"\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
"\e[1;5B": history-search-forward


>   * Futures expectation: My number one goal would be for it to
>  replace the Cygwin console for everything, although I
>  understand there are great difficulties with that goal.

Hmm, yep, unfortunately the only path I can see towards that goal is to 
take Console2's approach of capturing a Windows console, and to try and 
make the cygwin terminal running inside it more standards-compliant, but 
that would still leave the slowness of the console and the lag caused by 
 capturing its contents.

Perhaps it would be possible to override and reimplement the Win32 
console functions as listed at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682073(VS.85).aspx ?
Do DOS software interrupts still work too? It would certainly be a huge 
amount of work though, which would include having to reimplement the 
console's ANSI emulation.


> Because of the nature of various "discussion" elements in wading
> through this stuff, I am referring to my documentation "project" as:
> *Diuretics*!

*grin*


> @@ What "alternate screen"? @@

Good question. It's vt100 lingo for a second logical screen that 
wholescreen apps such as editors normally use, often through the 
(n)curses library. (I'm taking "wholescreen" to mean an app controlling 
the whole terminal screen, as opposed to the terminal window being in 
fullscreen mode.)

>     = Is there an alternate screen toggle in 'mintty' as there is
>       in 'xterm'?

I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find this useful?


>     = How do you invoke it?

You shouldn't need to really. Apps such as 'less' or 'vi' switch to it 
using the releavant vt100 incantation.


> [about mousewheel scrolling in less]
> the feature doesn't work in Vista when the
> scrollbar is shown. Looks like the inactive scrollbar is
> swallowing the mousewheel events.

Actually this seems to be an issue with the trackpad driver on my 
laptop. It's works fine with a bog-standard USB mouse on my desktop.

Thanks again,
Andy

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