Mintty
A terminal emulator for Cygwin, MSYS2 and WSL on Windows with thorough xterm compatibility.
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About Mintty
Mintty is the terminal window used by Cygwin, MSYS, MSYS2 and related projects, and it can also host WSL shells. It aims for full xterm-compatible emulation, covering DEC terminal screen control features up to VT420 rectangular areas.
Text handling is a particular focus: full Unicode, bidirectional rendering with Arabic shaping, multiple simultaneous fonts, complete emoji sequences and reflow of wrapped lines on resize. It also displays images, including Sixel and ReGIS graphics, and supports 256 colours and true colour.
Strengths
- Thorough xterm and DEC terminal emulation
- Strong Unicode, bidi and emoji rendering
- Sixel, ReGIS and image display support
- Works with Cygwin, MSYS2 and WSL
Limitations
- Windows only
- Needs Cygwin, MSYS2 or WSL underneath to be useful
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree and open source.
- License
- GPL-3.0
- Developer
- The Mintty contributors
- Platforms
- Windows
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Windows users running Cygwin, MSYS2 or WSL shells who want a capable terminal
- Categories
- Terminals
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Facts checked against the developer's own pages and store listings, 1 sources on file.
Alternatives to Mintty
Compare allSoftware that can replace Mintty for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
WSLtty
A Windows terminal for Windows Subsystem for Linux based on mintty and wslbridge2.
WSLtty is built on mintty for WSL shells, adding shortcuts for each distribution and Explorer menu entries, but it has no tabs and targets WSL rather than Cygwin or MSYS2.
Windows Terminal
Microsoft’s tabbed terminal for Windows, hosting Command Prompt, PowerShell and WSL in one GPU-rendered window.
Windows Terminal hosts Command Prompt, PowerShell and WSL in one GPU-rendered window with tabs and split panes, configured by editing JSON.
ConEmu
Keep several Windows console sessions in a tabbed window.
ConEmu keeps several Windows console sessions in one tabbed window with configurable layouts, under a BSD-3-Clause license.
Cmder
Carry a configured Windows console environment between machines.
Cmder bundles a terminal interface with command-line enhancements into a portable Windows console environment you can carry between machines.
WezTerm
A GPU-accelerated terminal that is also a multiplexer, configured in Lua and the same on every platform.
WezTerm is a GPU-accelerated terminal with built-in multiplexing and Lua configuration that also runs on macOS and Linux, without needing Cygwin or MSYS2.
Alacritty
A deliberately minimal OpenGL terminal that leaves multiplexing and tabs to other programs and just draws text fast.
Alacritty is a minimal OpenGL terminal that uses ConPTY on Windows 10 1809 or later, has no tabs, and shares configuration with macOS and Linux.
Tabby
A terminal, SSH client and serial console in one window, with a connection manager and an encrypted secret store.
Tabby is an Electron terminal that adds SSH, Telnet and serial connections and Clink-based tab completion on Windows, with higher memory use.
Contour Terminal
Run shell sessions in a GPU-rendered terminal emulator.
Contour is a GPU-rendered Apache-2.0 terminal with ligatures, Unicode and tabs across Windows, macOS and Linux, needing a compatible graphics setup.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
Clink
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MobaXterm
A Windows remote-computing toolbox: tabbed SSH, an X11 server, RDP, VNC, FTP and Unix commands in one portable executable.
tmux
Keeps terminal sessions alive on a server after you disconnect, and splits one window into many.
Nerd Fonts
A collection of programming fonts patched with thousands of icons, plus a patcher for adding them to other fonts.
Starship
A shell prompt that shows the git branch, language version and other context, configured once and working in every shell.
Zsh
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