mintty is a

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termin ...

for

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin in ...

, the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

-like environment for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. It features a native Windows

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

and does not require a

display server In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...

; its terminal emulation is aimed to be compatible with

xterm In computing, xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. It allows users to run programs which require a command-line interface. If no particular program is specified, xterm runs the user's shell. An X display can show ...

. Mintty is based on the terminal emulation and Windows frontend parts of

PuTTY Putty is a material with high plasticity, similar in texture to clay or dough, typically used in domestic construction and repair as a sealant or filler. Although some types of putty (typically those using linseed oil) slowly polymerise and be ...

, but improves on them in a number of ways, particularly regarding xterm compatibility. It is written in C. The

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

provided by

is used to communicate with processes running within mintty, while its user interface is implemented using the

Windows API The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations th ...

. The program icon comes from

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

Konsole Konsole is a free and open-source terminal emulator graphical application which is part of KDE Applications and ships with the KDE desktop environment. Konsole was originally written by Lars Doelle. It ls licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later and t ...

. Towards the end of 2011, mintty became Cygwin's default terminal. Advantages over Cygwin's previous default console include a more flexible user interface and closer adherence to Unix standards and conventions. Since it is not based on the standard

Windows console Windows Console is the infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows. An instance of a Windows Console has a screen buffer and an input buffer. It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode (so as to oc ...

, however, programs written specifically for that do not work correctly in mintty. It is also available for

MSYS MinGW ("Minimalist GNU for Windows"), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. MinGW includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows ...

(a more minimal Unix environment forked from Cygwin). Originally, the project's name was styled "MinTTY", following the example of

, but it was later restyled to "mintty", which was felt to better suit the project's minimalist approach.

References

External links

* Free software programmed in C Free terminal emulators {{free-software-stub