The best console for Windows

[vimim]

Hi,

WinTTY is the tool I have been dreaming for years, and now the dream
becomes true.

For the first time in fifteen years using cygwin, I am able to type
Chinese in console:
http://maxiangjiang.googlepages.com/vimim_tty_logo.gif

The environments are simple:

# Windows XP (American English version)
# No IME for CJK
# No X

Now, I can simply replace rxvt with mintty without problem.

One suggestion for initialization/portability:

It would be nice if MinTTY can read minttyrc (no dot before) in the
same directory as mintty.exe. Therefore I only need add two files in
my USB drive (mintty.exe and minttyrc).

One wish for vim/more applications:

After exiting vim or more, the text buffer disappears. I have got used
to see part of the text buffer as the scrollable history. (Please
compare the rxvt behavior).

Thanks again

vimim

[Andy Koppe]

maxiangjiang wrote:
> One suggestion for initialization/portability:
>
> It would be nice if MinTTY can read  minttyrc  (no dot before) in the
> same directory as mintty.exe.

The --config (or -c) option can be used to tell mintty where to find
its config file.

> Therefore I only need add two files in
> my USB drive (mintty.exe and minttyrc).

I'm afraid you'll at least need the Cygwin DLL as well, and also bash
or something else to run inside mintty, including whatever support
files are needed for that.

> One wish for vim/more applications:
>
> After exiting vim or more, the text buffer disappears.

That doesn't actually happen for 'more'. Did you mean 'less'?

With 'vim' and 'less' this happens because they use the so-called
alternate screen, which is a secondary screen buffer intended for
fullscreen applications. At exit they switch back to the normal
screen, so you get your command line back as it was before invoking
the app.

To change that, you need to tell the apps not to to switch to the
alternate screen. For 'less', do 'export LESS=-X'. For vim, add this
to your .vimrc: 'set t_ti= t_te='.

Regards,
Andy


ps: Thanks for the nice feedback! Mintty inherited most of its Unicode
and IME support from PuTTY, though, so thanks should primarily go to
Simon Tatham and the PuTTY team.

[vimim]

Great! It's getting perfect!

I have just made a strong recommendation to computer software
community in China:
http://code.google.com/p/vimim/wiki/VimIM_MinTTY