Cygwin Mintty works better on Windows 7 64bit than Cygwin.bat (bash)
I have been struggling with cygwin on my Windows 7 64bit computer for a while. My first fix was to use the new 1.7.x version in which they claimed to have support for my os. Initially 1.7 seemed only to really support the 32bit version of Windows 7, but everyone seemed to have issues with incorporating it into the 64bit version.
Today I was doing a little research and someone suggested a user use mintty as a unix and Windows 7 solution. Since mintty was already installed on my computer with the cygwin setup.exe program, I figured I would give it a shot. I mean what could it hurt, and I have been really frustrated with the default Cygwin.bat shortcut on my desktop. To me it was too much like the dos prompt.
My first impression of using mintty was that the font looked a little different, but other than that, it was a huge improvement. Some of the advantages to mintty were:
- Mouse Wheel works with scroll bar
- Ability to Cut and Paste with mouse
- Windows Transparency
- Very extensive Mouse Support
- Native Windows Interface
- Based on the Putty codebase
- Options can be set for your terminal in a graphical interface
I really liked what I was seeing here so far. It is a much better interface than what I had been using in the past by a long shot. I love the way you can click on the screen and make it go fullscreen. You can even click on the screen, select options, and customize various options of your terminal.
My biggest frustration with cygwin on my computer currently has been when I tried to run fvwm. I have found that it would not run consistently when I initiated it from the cygwin.bat command prompt. I decided that I would go ahead and give this a shot inside of mintty, but figured I would just get the same old results. To my surprise, minitty executed fvwm a lot more consistently than before. There are still issues with it.
I am now done with the old way, and not looking back. Mintty is loads better than any shell interface I have used so far, and my cygwin environment is back and running again like the old days. I don’t even need to use fvwm now. The only reason that I was using fvwm was to support the mrxvt terminal, but mintty works 100% better on my machine so why even bother.
Mintty doesn't (yet) support changing ansi color mappings from the UI. but you can get it done via ansi escape codes. Here's the sequence to get the famous "desert" color scheme. Add it to your .bashrc.
echo -e "\e]4;15;#ffffff\a"
echo -e "\e]4;14;#ffd700\a"
echo -e "\e]4;13;#ff55ff\a"
echo -e "\e]4;12;#87ceeb\a"
echo -e "\e]4;11;#ffff55\a"
echo -e "\e]4;10;#55ff55\a"
echo -e "\e]4;9;#ff5555\a"
echo -e "\e]4;8;#555555\a"
echo -e "\e]4;7;#f5deb3\a"
echo -e "\e]4;6;#ffa0a0\a"
echo -e "\e]4;5;#ffdead\a"
echo -e "\e]4;4;#cd853f\a"
echo -e "\e]4;3;#f0e68c\a"
echo -e "\e]4;2;#98fb98\a"
echo -e "\e]4;1;#ff2b2b\a"
echo -e "\e]4;0;#4d4d4d\a"
Set the foreground, background and cursor color from the UI. I suggest:
foreground = 255,255,255
background = 51,51,51
cursor = 0,255,0
Have fun :-)
Posted by Devraj Iyer on July 14, 2010 at 04:22 AM EDT #
Mintty doesn't (yet) support changing ansi color mappings from the UI. but you can get it done via ansi escape codes. Here's the sequence to get the famous "desert" color scheme. Add it to your .bashrc.
echo -e "\e]4;15;#ffffff\a"
echo -e "\e]4;14;#ffd700\a"
echo -e "\e]4;13;#ff55ff\a"
echo -e "\e]4;12;#87ceeb\a"
echo -e "\e]4;11;#ffff55\a"
echo -e "\e]4;10;#55ff55\a"
echo -e "\e]4;9;#ff5555\a"
echo -e "\e]4;8;#555555\a"
echo -e "\e]4;7;#f5deb3\a"
echo -e "\e]4;6;#ffa0a0\a"
echo -e "\e]4;5;#ffdead\a"
echo -e "\e]4;4;#cd853f\a"
echo -e "\e]4;3;#f0e68c\a"
echo -e "\e]4;2;#98fb98\a"
echo -e "\e]4;1;#ff2b2b\a"
echo -e "\e]4;0;#4d4d4d\a"
Set the foreground, background and cursor color from the UI. I suggest:
foreground = 255,255,255
background = 51,51,51
cursor = 0,255,0
Have fun :-)
Posted by Devraj Iyer on July 14, 2010 at 04:22 AM EDT #