• Using shortcuts to start mintty
• Starting mintty from a batch file
• Creating a folder context menu entry for mintty
• Setting environment variables
• Starting in a particular directory
• Terminal line settings
• Readline configuration
• Mode-dependent cursor in vim
• Avoiding escape timeout issues in vim
• Using Ctrl+Tab to switch session in GNU Screen
• Compose key
• Changing colours

Using shortcuts to start mintty

The Cygwin setup.exe package for mintty installs a shortcut in the Windows start menu under All Programs/Cygwin. That starts mintty with a '-' (i.e. a single dash) as its only argument, which tells it to invoke the user's default shell as a login shell.

Shortcuts are also a convenient way to start mintty with additional options and different commands. For example, shortcuts for access to remote machines can be created by invoking ssh. The command simply needs to be appended to the target field of the shortcut's properties:

Target: C:\Cygwin\bin\mintty.exe /bin/ssh server

The cygutils package provides the mkshortcut utility for creating shortcuts from the command line. See its manual page for details.

Starting mintty from a batch file

In order to start mintty from a batch file it needs to be invoked through the start command. This avoids the batch file's console window staying open while mintty is running. For example:

start mintty -

The console window for the batch file will still show up briefly, however. This can be avoided by invoking mintty from a shortcut instead, as described above.

Creating a folder context menu entry for mintty

Cygwin's chere package can be used to create folder context menu entries in Explorer, which allow a shell to be opened with the working directory set to the selected folder.

The following command will create an entry called Bash Prompt Here for the current user that will invoke bash running in mintty. See the chere manual (man chere) for all the options.

chere -i -c -t mintty

Setting environment variables

Unfortunately Windows shortcuts do not allow the setting of environment variables. Variables can be set globally though via a button on the Advanced tab of the system properties. Those can be reached by right-clicking on the (My) Computer entry in the start menu or on the desktop, selecting Properties, then Advanced System Settings.

Alternatively, global variables can be set using the setx command line utility. This comes pre-installed with some versions of Windows but is also available as part of the freely downloadable Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools.

The env utility can be used to set variables specifically for the program to be run in mintty, e.g.:

mintty /bin/env DISPLAY=:0 /bin/ssh -X server

Starting in a particular directory

The working directory for a mintty session can be set in the Start In field of a shortcut, or by changing directory in an invoking script. Note, however, that Cygwin's /etc/profile script for login shells automatically changes to the user's home directory. The profile script can be told not to do this by setting a variable called CHERE_INVOKING, like this:

mintty /bin/env CHERE_INVOKING=1 /bin/bash -l

Terminal line settings

Terminal line settings can be viewed or changed with the stty utility, which is installed as part of Cygwin's core utilities package. Among other things, it can set the control characters used for generating signals or editing an input line.

See the stty manual for all the details, but here are a few examples. The commands can be included in shell startup files to make them permanent.

To change the key for deleting a whole word from Ctrl+W to Ctrl+Backspace:

stty werase '^_'

To use Ctrl+Enter instead of Ctrl+D for end of file:

stty eof '^^'

To use Pause and Break instead of Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+C for suspending or interrupting a process:

stty susp '^]' swtch '^]' intr '^\'

With these settings, the Esc key can also be used to interrupt processes by setting its keycode to ^\:

echo -ne '\e[?7728h'

(The standard escape character ^[ cannot be used for that purpose because it appears as the first character in many keycodes.)

Unix terminal line drivers have a flow control feature that allow terminal output to be stopped with Ctrl+S and restarted with Ctrl+Q. However, due to the scrollback feature in modern terminal emulators, there is little need for this. Hence, to make those key combinations available for other uses, disable flow control with this command:

stty -ixon

Readline configuration

Keyboard input for the bash shell and other programs that use the readline library can be configured with the so-called inputrc file. Unless overridden by setting the INPUTRC variable, this is located at ~/.inputrc. It consists of bindings of keycodes to readline commands, whereby comments start with a hash character. See its manual for details.

Anyone used to Windows key combinations for editing text might find the following bindings useful:

# Ctrl+Left/Right to move by whole words
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word

# Ctrl+Backspace/Delete to delete whole words
"\e[3;5~": kill-word
"\C-_": backward-kill-word

# Ctrl+Shift+Backspace/Delete to delete to start/end of the line
"\e[3;6~": kill-line
"\xC2\x9F": backward-kill-line  # for UTF-8
#"\x9F": backward-kill-line     # for ISO-8859-x
#"\e\C-_": backward-kill-line   # for any other charset

# Alt-Backspace for undo
"\e\d": undo

(The Ctrl+Shift+Backspace keycode depends on the selected character set, so the appropriate binding needs to be chosen.)

Finally, a couple of bindings for convenient searching of the command history. Just enter the first few characters of a previous command and press Ctrl+Up to look it up.

# Ctrl+Up/Down for searching command history
"\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
"\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

Mode-dependent cursor in vim

Mintty supports control sequences for changing cursor style. These can be used to configure vim such that the cursor changes depending on mode. For example, with the following lines in ~/.vimrc, vim will show a block cursor in normal mode and a line cursor in insert mode:

let &t_ti.="\e[1 q"
let &t_SI.="\e[5 q"
let &t_EI.="\e[1 q"
let &t_te.="\e[0 q"

Avoiding escape timeout issues in vim

It's a historical flaw of Unix terminals that the keycode of the escape key, i.e. the escape character, also appears at the start of many other keycodes. This means that on seeing an escape character, an application cannot be sure whether to treat it as an escape key press or whether to expect more characters to complete a longer keycode.

Therefore they tend to employ a timeout to decide. The delay on the escape key can be annoying though, particularly with the mode-dependent cursor above enabled. The timeout approach can also fail on slow connections or a heavily loaded machine.

Mintty's "application escape key mode" can be used to avoid this by switching the escape key to an unambiguous keycode. Add the following to ~/.vimrc to employ it in vim:

let &t_ti.="\e[?7727h"
let &t_te.="\e[?7727l"
noremap <Esc>O[ <Esc>
noremap! <Esc>O[ <Esc>

Note that the last line causes vi-compatible behaviour to be used when pressing Esc on the command line: the command is executed rather than cancelled as is the default for vim. If the latter is preferred, replace the last line with a mapping to ^C:

noremap! <Esc>O[ <C-c>

Using Ctrl+Tab to switch session in GNU Screen

The Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab key combinations can be used to switch session in GNU Screen. In order to do do, their use as shortcuts for switching mintty windows needs to be disabled on the Keys page of the options, and their keycodes need to be mapped in ~/.screenrc:

bindkey "^[[1;5I" next
bindkey "^[[1;6I" prev

Compose key

Mintty uses the Windows keyboard layout system with its "dead key" mechanism for entering accented characters. X11, on the other hand, has the compose key mechanism for this purpose. The open source AllChars utility can be used to emulate that approach on Windows.

Changing colours

The default foreground, background and cursor colours can be changed in the options dialog, or by specifying the ForegroundColour, BackgroundColour and CursorColour settings in the configuration file or on the command line.

However, they can also be changed from within the terminal using the xterm control sequences for this purpose, for example:

echo -ne '\e]10;#000000\a'  # Black foreground
echo -ne '\e]11;#C0C0C0\a'  # Light gray background
echo -ne '\e]12;#00FF00\a'  # Green cursor

In mintty, the RGB colour values can also be specified using a comma-separated decimal notation, for example 255,0,0 instead of #FF0000 for red. X11 colour names are not currently supported though.

The 16 ANSI colours can be set in the configuration file or on the command line using settings such as Blue or BoldMagenta. These are documented in the configuration section of the manual. They can also be changed using xterm control sequences. Here they are with their default values:

echo -ne '\e]4;0;#000000\a'   # black
echo -ne '\e]4;1;#BF0000\a'   # red
echo -ne '\e]4;2;#00BF00\a'   # green
echo -ne '\e]4;3;#BFBF00\a'   # yellow
echo -ne '\e]4;4;#0000BF\a'   # blue
echo -ne '\e]4;5;#BF00BF\a'   # magenta
echo -ne '\e]4;6;#00BFBF\a'   # cyan
echo -ne '\e]4;7;#BFBFBF\a'   # white (light grey really)
echo -ne '\e]4;8;#404040\a'   # bold black (i.e. dark grey)
echo -ne '\e]4;9;#FF4040\a'   # bold red
echo -ne '\e]4;10;#40FF40\a'  # bold green
echo -ne '\e]4;11;#FFFF40\a'  # bold yellow
echo -ne '\e]4;12;#4040FF\a'  # bold blue
echo -ne '\e]4;13;#FF40FF\a'  # bold magenta
echo -ne '\e]4;14;#40FFFF\a'  # bold cyan
echo -ne '\e]4;15;#FFFFFF\a'  # bold white