Mintty

Mintty is a program used as a terminal emulator for MSYS and Cygwin. A terminal emulator is an application utilized to emulate a video terminal within some other display architecture. Cygwin is an environment similar to Unix with a command-line interface designed for Microsoft Windows while MSYS is a collection of GNU utilities that helps in building applications that would run UNIX-based systems. Mintty provides users with a windows-based user interface and doesn't have need of access to an X Server. The program is based on the terminal emulation of PuTTY (another open-sourced terminal emulator) and is written using the C programming language.

Mintty provides various features such as:

• Native Windows UI with simple options dialog
• Drag and Drop action for folders, files and text
• Xterm-compatible terminal emulation
• Copy and paste action

This program also allows users to open URLs and files using the Ctrl + Click action. Mintty comes with wide character display, support for character-encoding that covers UTF-8, a database of up to 256 colors, and an option to view the application in full screen mode. In addition, the program has its options stored in a text file, without the need for registry entries.

Mintty also comes with a user manual that can help users familiarize themselves with the program’s interface and controls.