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

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:

IMECursorColour=255,0,0

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.