Updated: mintty-0.9.1-1

Andy Koppe andy.koppe@gmail.com
Mon Oct 4 01:04:00 GMT 2010


mintty 0.9.1-1 is on its way to the Cygwin mirrors. This is a feature release.

DESCRIPTION
===========
Mintty is a terminal emulator for Cygwin with a native Windows user
interface and minimalist design. Among its features are Unicode
support and a graphical options dialog. Its terminal emulation is
largely compatible with xterm, but it does not require an X server.

CHANGES
=======
Documentation:
- Turned some man page sections into wiki pages (at
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/w): keycodes, control sequences, and
tips.
- Added a tip on how to use Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab to switch
session in GNU screen.
- Added a wiki page with past changes and one listing PuTTY issues
that are addressed in mintty.

Display issues:
- On multimonitor systems, the window size is no longer limited to the
size of a single monitor.
- The program window should no longer be opened with parts off the
screen or obscured by the taskbar (unless of course the window is too
big to fit into the available workspace).
- Fixed an issue with cursor flicker on Vista and 7 with Aero
disabled.
- The options dialog no longer flashes when changing page while
transparency is enabled, as happened on non-Aero systems.
- Added automatic fallback scheme for VT100 line drawing characters.
If appropriate Unicode characters aren't available in the selected
font, ASCII approximations are used instead.

Colours:
- Added ability to set the 16 ANSI colours in the config file (or on
the command line via the -o option), like so: Blue=0,0,255 or
BoldGreen=128,255,128. The manual has all the colour names.
- Added ability to switch cursor colour depending on whether the Input
Method Editor (IME) is active. This is activated by setting
'IMECursorColour' in the config file (or via the -o option). So, for
example, adding IMECursorColour=255,0,0 to ~/.minttyrc will turn the
cursor red when the IME is active. (IMEs allow entering characters
that aren't on the keyboard and are crucial for East Asian languages.)
- Renamed 'Show bold is bright' setting to 'Show bold as colour'.
- Removed the 'Use system colours instead' checkbox from the options
dialog. The UseSystemColours config file setting remains.

Selection:
- Added config-file only 'WordChars' setting for controlling the
characters selected by a double click. By default, mintty uses an
algorithm that's geared towards picking out filenames and URLs. If
WordChars is set, that algorithm is disabled, and instead only
letters, digits, and the characters specified with this setting are
selected. For example, setting WordChars=_ would ensure that C
identifiers are picked out correctly.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when copying lots of text on systems
with a doublebyte default codepage.

Xterm compatibility:
- Added support for xterm's VT220-style function key mode (as opposed
to the default "PC-style" keycodes), where Ctrl+F3 through Ctrl+F10
act as F13 through F20, the Home and End keys send different keycodes,
and the numpad sends "application keypad" codes if enabled with the
DECPAM sequence.
- In mouse tracking mode, concurrent mouse button presses are now
handled in the same way as they are in xterm, i.e. mintty no longer
sends a fake mouse release event when the second button is pressed.
- 'Extended Mouse Mode' as introduced in xterm #262 is now supported.
This allows row/column positions greater than 255 (and up to 2015) to
be reported, in case you do get that 30'' monitor ...
- Normalise incoming combining characters to the precomposed form, as
xterm does. This makes them look better on screen.

Misc:
- Fixed crash in Ctrl+Tab handling that showed up on some setups.
- Handle VK_PACKET virtual key, to ensure compatibility with the
AllChars utility for emulating a Compose key on Windows.
- Alt+F4 prompts for exit confirmation if the shell has any child
processes, as already happens with the close button. (There's an
option for disabling this.)
- Changed the SGR 21 sequence from setting the underline attribute to
selecting normal intensity, for compatibility with the Linux console.
(Xterm ignores this one.)

QUESTIONS
=========
The mintty manual is installed as a manpage ('man mintty'), and it's
also available in PDF format at
http://mintty.googlecode.com/files/mintty-0.9.1.pdf.

Questions and comments can be sent to the mintty discussion group at
http://groups.google.com/group/mintty-discuss or the Cygwin mailing
list. Please use the issue tracker at
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/list to report bugs or suggest
enhancements.

====================================================================

To update your installation, click on the "Install Cygwin now" link
on the http://cygwin.com web page.  This downloads setup.exe to
your system.  Then, run setup and answer all of the questions.

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