[ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: mintty 3.6.0

[Andy Koppe]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2022 at 18:18, Thomas Wolff wrote:
>
> I have uploaded mintty 3.6.0 with the following changes:
>
> Highlights
>    * Optional feature: Reflow terminal lines when resizing terminal width.
>    * Visual feedback of numeric or composed character input.
>    * New themes helmholtz and luminous (contributed by Andy Koppe).
>    * Setting helmholtz theme as default colour scheme.
>
> Window handling
>    * Reflow terminal lines when resizing terminal width (#82, #219,
> mintty/wsltty#154).
>
> Terminal features
>    * Tweak pending auto-wrap state affected when switching wrap modes.
>    * Fixed unscroll (CSI +T) in case width has changed meanwhile.
>    * Visual feedback of numeric or composed character input.
>
> Keyboard handling
>    * Support user-defined mappings for Super-/Hyper-modified character keys.
>    * Support optional user-defined mappings for Control-/Alt-modified
> character keys (#399, #252, #523, #602, #645, ~#524, ~#817, ~#451).
>    * Suspend shortcut handling during numeric character input.
>    * Revise and fix numeric character input.
>    * Distinct Unicode vs. hexadecimal numeric character input.
>    * Menu key opens menu inside terminal, also stops numeric input.
>    * Fixed Compose sequences with more than 2 characters (broken since
> 3.1.5).
>
> Font rendering
>    * Right-to-left font fallback (#1148).
>    * Fixed auto-widening of ambiguous-width letters (broken since 3.4.4).
>    * Speedup rendering of replacement indication of invalid character
> codes (#1145).
>    * Extend cell zoom to some Geometric Shapes U+25E2.., Dingbats
> U+1F67C.., and Symbols U+1FB00..U+1FBB3.
>
> Startup
>    * Trimming irrelevant and possibly confusing environment variables
> before child invocation (xterm).
>
> Configuration
>    * New themes helmholtz and luminous (contributed by Andy Koppe).
>    * Setting helmholtz theme as default colour scheme.
>    * New option -Rt to report the tty name of the child process / shell.
>    * New option ShootFoot (#399, #252, #523, #602, #645, ~#524, ~#817,
> ~#451).
>    * New option RewrapOnResize (#82), interactive (Options dialog).
>    * New user-definable function unicode-char.
>    * Updated X11-derived data: compose sequences and colour names.
>
> The homepage is at http://mintty.github.io/
> It also links to the issue tracker.

This is years too late, but I'd still like to take this opportunity to
say a huge Thank You to Thomas for rescuing mintty from the ashes of
Google Code and maintaining and developing it so well since.

The rewrap on resize is another great and long-requested feature he's
added. It's on the Window page of the options for anyone who wants to
give it a try.

Re the colour themes, my original default has orderly colour values,
but rather uneven actual colours. For example, non-bold blue is barely
legible on a black background, and red is significantly darker than
green in diffs.

So I tried adjusting the colours to equal luminance according to the
formulas of the sRGB colour space, which resulted in the 'luminous'
theme. Unfortunately that has pretty much the opposite problem of the
original: e.g. red is too bright and yellow is too dark. And that's
because of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz-Kohlrausch_effect

As I didn't find a suitable formula to compensate for that, I used
experimentally determined correction factors to get to roughly (and
subjectively) equal brightness, resulting in the 'kohlrausch' theme.

The 'helmholtz' theme that is now the default is identical to that,
except for a somewhat darker non-bold blue, as a compromise between
legibiility on black and use as a background colour itself in programs
like mc. The bold blue is similar to what's used for links on
dark-themed websites.

The original theme can be restored using the 'mintty' entry in the
dropdown on the 'Looks' page of the options. Existing colour
customisations should not be affected by the change of default.

Andy