mintty

mintty is the terminal emulator for Cygwin and MSYS2 on Windows, and it can also host WSL sessions. It began as a fork of PuTTY 0.60's terminal code by Andy Koppe and is now maintained by Thomas Wolff. It suits Windows users who run a Unix-like shell through Cygwin, MSYS2 or WSL and want a native Windows terminal with close xterm compatibility.

Settings are stored as NAME=VALUE lines in a text file, with no registry entries. mintty reads /etc/minttyrc, $APPDATA/mintty/config, ~/.config/mintty/config and ~/.minttyrc in that order, then any files given with -c/--config, and single settings can be passed with -o. An options dialog writes changes back to the config file. The full reference is the mintty(1) manual page, with further notes in the project wiki. Theme files set the colour scheme, with an optional separate theme for Windows dark mode.

Terminal emulation covers xterm sequences and DEC screen control up to VT420 rectangular areas, along with true colour, extended underline styles, bidirectional text, emoji sequences and reflow on resize. Graphics include Sixel, image display through iTerm2's image controls (PNG, JPEG, GIF and other formats), ReGIS and Tektronix 4014 emulation. Font ligatures are rendered through the Windows Uniscribe API and can be redrawn during input with LigaturesSupport. Other features are screen and scrollback search, Ctrl+click to open files and URLs, HTML and image screenshot export, user-defined shortcuts and menu functions, and interface localisation.

mintty runs only on Windows and only under a Cygwin-type runtime (Cygwin, MSYS2 or derived projects), so it is not a general Windows console host for cmd or PowerShell. Rendering uses Windows text output APIs rather than the GPU. Tabs are virtual: each session is its own mintty window, and the --tabbar option (TabBar with SessionGeomSync) overlays those windows behind a shared tab bar to give a tabbed window. There are no splits. The project does not accept unsolicited pull requests and asks that proposals be discussed in an issue first.