• Introduction
• Escape keycode
• Scrollbar hiding
• Shortcut override mode
• Mousewheel reporting
• Ambiguous width reporting
• Font size
• Font coverage
• Locale
• Cursor style

Introduction

Mintty's terminal emulation is aimed at compatibility with xterm. Most of the xterm control sequences documented at http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html are supported. Please report as bugs any incompatibilities or unimplemented sequences that would be useful.

Some sequences that were introduced by other terminals such as the Linux console, and that aren't available in xterm, are also supported.

This page only lists control sequences that are specific to mintty. Caret notation is used to show control characters. The full details of all supported control sequences are only available in the source code.

Escape keycode

There are two settings controlling the keycode sent by the Esc key.

The first controls application escape key mode, where the escape key sends a keycode that allows applications such as vim to tell it apart from the escape character appearing at the start of many other keycodes, without resorting to a timeout mechanism.

When application escape key mode is off, the escape key can be be configured to send ^\ instead of the standard ^[. This allows the escape key to be used as one of the special keys in the terminal line settings (as set with the stty utility).

Scrollbar hiding

These sequences can be used to hide or show the scrollbar, whereby the window size remains the same but the number of character columns is changed to account for the width of the scrollbar. If the the scrollbar is disabled in the options, it will always remain hidden.

Shortcut override mode

When shortcut override mode is on, all shortcut key combinations are sent to the application instead of triggering window commands.

Mousewheel reporting

Mintty includes support for sending mousewheel events to an application without having to enable full xterm mouse tracking, which takes over all mouse events and isn't supported by every application.

Mousewheel reporting only happens on the alternate screen, whereas on the primary screen, the mousewheel scrolls the scrollback buffer. The following two sequences enable or disable mousewheel reporting. It is enabled by default.

By default, mousewheel events are reported as cursor key presses, which enables mousewheel scrolling in applications such as less without requiring any configuration. Alternatively, mousewheel reporting can be switched to application mousewheel mode, where the mousewheel sends its own separate keycodes that allow an application to treat the mousewheel differently from cursor keys:

Application mousewheel mode is controlled by these sequences:

Ambiguous width reporting

Applications can ask to be notified when the width of the so-called ambiguous width character category changes due to the user changing font.

When enabled, ^[[1W is sent when changing to an "ambiguous narrow" font and ^[[2W is sent when changing to an "ambiguous wide" font.

Font size

The following OSC ("operating system command") sequences can be used to change and query font size:

As usual, OSC sequences can also be terminated with ^[\ (ST, the string terminator) instead of ^G. When the font size is queried, a sequence that would restore the current size is sent, terminated with ST: ^[]7700;num^[\.

Font coverage

Fonts vary widely in their Unicode coverage, i.e. they usually miss glyphs for many characters. The following sequence can be used to enquire about support for a specified list of characters.

^[]7771;?;char0;char1...^G

Characters shall be specified with their decimal Unicode codepoint. Any number of characters can be given. Mintty replies with the same sequence, except that the question mark is replaced with an exclamation mark and that codes for characters that the current font does not have a glyph for are omitted.

Locale

The locale and charset used by the terminal can be queried or changed using these OSC sequences introduced by rxvt-unicode:

The locale string used here should take the same format as in the locale environment variables such as LANG. When the locale is queried, a sequence that would set the current locale is sent, e.g. ^[]701;C.UTF-8^G. An empty loc string selects the locale configured in the options or the environment.

Cursor style

The VT510 DECSCUSR sequence can be used to control cursor shape and blinking.

^[ [ arg SP q