mintty/Windows interoperability (was: Re: default terminal)
Thomas Wolff
towo@towo.net
Wed Jun 2 20:39:00 GMT 2010
Am 01.06.2010 01:14, schrieb Charles Wilson:
> On 5/31/2010 5:29 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>> I'm wondering what the rest of the maintainer community thinks, though.
>>
>> What do you all think about a two step plan of first making mintty part
>> of the default install and then making it the default terminal?
>>
> Sounds good to me.
>
I absolutely support to promote mintty side-by-side as one of two
desktop links.
Before making it the only default, however, there's still two issues to
consider concerning interoperability with Windows programs:
* The known limitation with certain Windows (or even DOS) programs
due to the incompatibility of some of the multiple Windows output
methods with pty. Is anyone still trying to find a wrapper that
might solve this for input and output?
* Another issue with even those Windows/DOS programs that do work in
general: They assume the Windows ANSI encoding so their output
(and input assumption) will not match the mintty character
encoding in most cases. (Test case: configure Windows UI to
"German", reboot (grumble), run mintty in UTF-8, enter 'xcopy'
(without parameters), see error message "Unzulâssige
Parameteranzahl"). This works fine in the Cygwin Console because
the I/O method used by those programs bypasses cygwin - the Cygwin
Console is actually a dual-character set environment. My initial
idea that Windows could be convinced to change that for mintty
with 'chcp.com 65001' failed. I discussed it with Andy already and
he suggested a fork point somewhere in cygwin (maybe winsup or
newlib?) where a Windows/DOS program is being distinguished from a
cygwin program anyway, and where a wrapper might be activated
implicitly. (I might try to work on a patch if I knew where that
point is.) The best thing to do then would be to wrap the spawned
Windows/DOS program into something like 'luit'. A work-around
would also be to switch mintty encoding dynamically but that would
not work with multiple programs producing output simultaneously,
for example from a background process.
------
Thomas
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