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Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin and Cygwin derivatives such as MSYS. It can be downloaded from here or it can be installed through Cygwin's setup.exe program, where it can be found in the Shells category. The Cygwin installer creates a shortcut for mintty in the Windows start menu. In MSYS, mintty can be installed with mingw-get install msys-mintty.

Features include:

Xterm-compatible terminal emulation.
Native Windows user interface with a simple options dialog.
Easy copy & paste.
Drag & drop of text, files and folders.
Ability to open files and URLs with Ctrl+click.
Comprehensive character encoding support, including UTF-8.
Wide character display and Windows IME support.
Window transparency, including glass effect on Vista and 7.
Options are stored in a text file. No registry entries.
Small program size and quick scrolling.

Mintty works on all Windows NT-based system, including Windows 7. Similarly to other pty-based Cygwin terminals, however, mintty is not a full replacement for the Windows Command Prompt. While native console programs with simple text output are usually fine, interactive programs often have problems, although sometimes there are workarounds.

The setup.exe package ships with a manual page that can be accessed with man mintty. A PDF version of the manual is also available. Invoking mintty with the --help option shows a summary of available command line options. Keycodes, control sequences and some random tips can be found on the wiki.

Please report bugs or suggest enhancements via the issue tracker. Vote for any issues you'd particularly like to see addressed by starring them. The discussion group for all things mintty is mintty-discuss. General Cygwin questions should be sent to the Cygwin mailing list.

Mintty is based on code from PuTTY 0.60 by Simon Tatham and team. The program icon comes from KDE's Konsole. Mintty ties directly into Cygwin and leaves out PuTTY's networking functionality, which is provided by Cygwin's openssh and inetutils packages instead. A number of PuTTY issues have been addressed.