In this post, I want to share some useful tips and configurations about mintty.

Share mintty config between Cygwin and wsltty#

Since both Cygwin and wsltty use mintty as its terminal emulator, it would be great if we could use a unified config file for mintty instead of having to configure separately on two locations. According to doc here, mintty provides such a feature: you need to put configuration in %APPDATA%\mintty\config so that mintty for Cygwin and wsltty can use the same config.

Quickly switch to other mintty windows#

Unlike iterm2 or other terminal emulator, mintty does not have a Tabbed window. However, mintty does provide a virtual tab feature. If you are using mintty 3.0.3 or above, you can switch between different mintty windows with several shortcuts:

• ctrl + right-click
• ctrl + right-click in the window title bar
• ctrl + menu

References#

• Virtual tabs.
• Virtual tab discussions.

Open file, directory or links#

Use ctrl+left-click to open a file, directory or URL (beginning with www).

Change cursor when IME is on#

The option IMECursorColour can be used to set the cursor color when IME is on. For example:

this will set cursor color to red when IME is on.

Show selection text size#

The option SelectionShowSize can be used to show the size of selection. 0 disable this feature. A value of 1-12 shows the size of selected text in a position corresponding to the clock hours.