Mintty discussion

[mintty]

As there is no active general discussion forum for mintty, I am reserving this issue for open discussion about further enhancements, opinions about open issues and their priorities and implementation options.

[DanielGGordon]

Why not use gitter.im?

[mintty]

Thanks for the hint. I have tentatively created a chat room.
Something like a forum (with structured topics) might be more useful, though.

[DanielGGordon]

I saw it and joined :)

I hear you on having 'topic' conversations. It looks like this is sort of possible with Gitter. Take a look at FreeCodeCamp. They have multiple chat rooms for various topics.

It would be nice if there was some sort of a chat in Github projects. Right now the only real way to communicate (on Github itself) is to create an issue (like this), or to comment on a pull request/commit.

Sometimes I want to ask a 'stupid' question, or make a suggestion - but without making permanent clutter via an 'issue'.

Anyway I'm still fairly new to Github, so maybe it's just me.

[mintty]

Unfortunately I cannot add another page with different access rights. But I could set up a second wiki (e.g. github.com/mintty/forum/wiki). Do you have a few links how such wikis in forum-like usage might look and develop?

[mintty]

With a dedicated "forum" repository, I could also misuse the "issues" features to maintain a second, forum-like issues list, rather than a wiki. That would meet the desired use case.

[mintty]

My idea was actually to use the "issues" rather than the "wiki" feature of a dedicated "forum" repository, because it provides sorting by topics and threading implicitly.
But then there would be 2 issues domains, maybe confusing and not a good idea either.
I guess we'll rather wait until github provides a decent forum feature...

[cardiffman]

I'm just wondering how to sort of casually bring up that I get a -Werror error in config.c when I pull down and build the master branch using gcc 4.9.3 on cygwin. The error is about config.c line 676. I think the analysis that the variable is assigned and then not referenced is correct, when mis_config is not defined.

I think it is valuable to be able to start by reporting something like this casually before filing a real issue.

[mintty]

Yes, that was a commit upload mistake to be fixed soon; note it's not a release, though.
Just remove the line locally for testing.

[mintty]

As an open design issue, for who is interested, I'd like to point out #524.

[mintty]

Request for comments: implementation details of drop mode #440.

[mintty]

See #568; I'm changing the bell to make sound by default, to comply with xterm.

[Equim-chan]

How to donate or sponsor mintty?

[mintty]

Thanks a lot for the offer. There is currently no need for donation but I'll think about a suitable way, maybe link to some charity.

[ariestav]

What are the license terms for including the build (.exe) of mintty in a commecial product? I understand that the source is open, but is it possible to bundle the binary with a commercial product that is for sale to an end user?

[mintty]

License files are included in the repository. The main license for mintty is the GNU license. It has been causing me headaches already and as I'm not a lawyer, I'll not be trying to explain it to other people.
It would be nice to state, however, what product you have in mind.

[ariestav]

Yes, we develop a product called Templater. It's an Adobe After Effects plugin. You can learn more about the product here: http://dataclay.com

Templater logs output to a text file and we want end-users to be able to tail their log files while the interact with the product's GUI. The log files are UTF-8 encoded and with ANSI colors. This works find out-of-the-box on macOS, however on Windows, there is no native tail command and color encoding does not seem to work as easily as it does on macOS. Needless to say, development for this type of feature on Windows is difficult at best without something like mintty or Cygwin's terminal. We are curious if we can ship a built binary of mintty in the product without penalty or fees.

I will definitely read the license, but I'm not lawyer, either. Any thoughts?

[mintty]

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html, and note that you must also provide the sources of any GPL'ed code that you distribute.
Also note the file LICENSE.bundling in the mintty repository which I put up a while ago to satisfy a similar request.

[ariestav]

Thank you for this information. I will investigate. When it says "provide the source of any GPL'ed code that you distribute," does it suffice to point to this repository? I would rather point to the official repo than to actually include the source code. I understand if it's absolutely necessary to include the actual source code files, but is a reference to the source code repo acceptable?

[mintty]

does it suffice to point to this repository?

Could be; that's how I do it myself.

[cardiffman]

I would point to a repo if it contains exactly what I build. If I made patches I would interpret the spirit of the GPL as, patches should be provided as well. Thus it may be more convenient to fork within GitHub and then point to the fork which has the patches.

[mintty]

Sounds OK, fork or separate patches as you prefer.
In either case, I would appreciate to get the purpose of patches explained, so if they are useful they can be integrated upstream.

[Biswa96]

Why does mintty.exe -e conhost.exe opens two console window and shows same text when I am writing some words?

[mintty]

With conhost from Windows (which you wouldn't normally run, must be a test case) or with a self-compiled thing? Cannot reproduce.

[mintty]

Apparently conhost is only visible from 64-bit Cygwin, not from 32-bit Cygwin.
When I run mintty -e conhost.exe (whether from mintty or from cmd) it only says "conhost: Exit 127."

[Biswa96]

I don't know if the following problem is for my case only. I open mintty.exe --WSL then run ls command in a big folder like /usr/bin or /usr/sbin. When the line reaches at end of window, the mintty windows crashes. Is it a bug?

[mintty]

Cannot reproduce. Is that with the release or the current repository version?
Crash means stall or close? Also with -h always? Maybe the shell terminates for some reason?

[Biswa96]

• When I open mintty --WSL and then run ls /bin the window close automatically without showing any error.
• When I open mintty -h always --WSL and then run ls /bin the window shows two errors /bin/wslbridge: Exit 1. and wslbridge error: connection broke. This happens when the command output is beyond the window size. May be this error not for mintty. Here is the screenshot:

• The problem seem to be my fault. When I compile wslbridge-backend with -static in makefile, it shows that error. @rprichard Can you tell why this problem occurs?

[mintty]

Did you use a newer download of wslbridge than the latest release (assumedly to capture the mount configuration issue)? I had a similar problem before when I built the frontend and used the release backend which did not match: rprichard/wslbridge#18 (comment)

[Biswa96]

There are some interesting patches in msys2 mintty. See this link: https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/tree/master/mintty . You may add those patches 😋

[mintty]

Thanks for the hint;

• patch 0002-add-msys2-launcher.patch:

Before, a pinned shortcut would have generic icon

Pinning works in general; it uses the icon of the instance being pinned, I think. There is also the feature once provided for Git-Bash: Application Taskbar Shortcut Launch Command.

and fail to launch a proper shell because of $MSYSTEM not being set.

This is an MSYS-specific issue, I think.

The list of shells is harcoded.

If that relates to a "jump list": mintty has added that feature recently, and configurable.

• patch 0003-fix-current-dir-inheritance-for-alt-f2-on-msys2.patch:

There have been fixes about Alt+F2 in current dir in 2.8.0 and 2.8.1. If you clone an instance that invoked a login shell, the CHERE_INVOKING=1 might further help, but I'm not convinced that mintty should intrude so far into shell setup. Interworking with shell profiles needs to be discussed further, i.e. whether this is really a good idea.

[mintty]

@Biswa96, @Alexpux, @forgottenswitch, @JPeterMugaas:
The problem with CHERE_INVOKING is that it only applies to bash, not other shells. So this might cause rather suprising and unexpected inconsistencies. I don't think it's a good idea to intertwine terminal and shell configuration this way.
On the other hand, if someone sets CHERE_INVOKING before starting mintty, it will be inherited to further mintty sessions started with Alt+F2, so that would work already.

[Biswa96]

I've seen that mintty gets wslbridge path from this line cmd = "/bin/wslbridge"; in winmain.c file.

In Windows API one can get the full path of executable with QueryFullProcessImageName() and GetCurrentProcess(). Is it possible to add like that in POSIX environment?

For example, let the full path of mintty is C:\foo\bar\mintty.exe. So the result will be wstring cmd = "C:\\foo\\bar\\wslbridge.exe" (not the .\\wslbridge).

[mintty]

/bin/wslbridge is a path in the Cygwin namespace; the Windows functions would not recognize it.
Also, what are you trying to achieve with this proposal? Find the wslbridge program? That works automatically within the Cygwin file system. The root is the parent of the folder where cygwin1.dll is loaded from. So /bin/wslbridge will be ../bin/wslbridge from there.

[Biswa96]

Why there is two mintty.exe after compiling it with cygwin? One in /bin another in /bin/cygwin64.

In winmain.c file you've make a function load_sys_library() to find system32 folder and load DLL from that. But you may use LoadLibraryEx with LOAD_LIBRARY_SEARCH_SYSTEM32 flag to find DLL from system32.

[mintty]

When I split the binary creation to be architecture-dependent (bin/cygwin32/ etc), I let it make a copy in bin/ to keep the cygport package deployment easy as before.

LoadLibraryEx ...

I didn't write that function, has been untouched for years. "Never touch a running system."

[BrianInglis]

Not everyone running mintty uses Win10; some numbers of mintty users are still running XP and 7; some may use it under Wine: only LOAD_LIBRARY_... flag values 1,2,8 are supported on XP; many new values require patches for support on 7 and Vista.

[mintty]

@Biswa96, @Alexpux, @forgottenswitch, @JPeterMugaas:
I've changed my mind about setting CHERE_INVOKING even though it's shell-specific. But it makes sense to use an existing mechanism so that mintty can stay in the directory explicitly selected. So this is now applied if option --dir is used or if Alt+F2 clones the window session.

[mintty]

Mintty 2.8.5 opens Alt+F2 in same directory (if maintaining current directory information) even in login mode.

[mintty]

I'm closing this issue which has meanwhile become quite old, in favour of a new general chat issue #777.
Feel free to enter any remaining questions or proposals again there or in a new issue.