The only Windows program that can call the Windows equivalent of openpty is conhost, which ships with the operating system. When you start xterm, xterm calls openpty, gets master and slave handles, starts your shell with the slave handle, and uses the master terminal to get the information needed to draw characters. POSIX systems allow anyone to create master and slave terminal handles. The master handle allows for reading both in-band and out-of-band information from the slave terminal handle and supports special APIs that allow anyone with access to the master handle to fully emulate a terminal. The slave is the terminal to which cmd or bash talks it basically emulates a teletype. Each terminal handle has two ends: master* and slave. Terminal handles are like full-duplex pipes, but richer : they transmit all the information needed for interaction with the user. bash or cmd (the shell) talks to the terminal via its standard input, output, and error file handles. conhost.exe is the terminal emulator, like xterm. This solves a lot of the issues of running Windows programs in a MSYS2 terminal.Windows really needs a public psuedoconsole API.įor the uninitiated: cmd.exe is the shell, like bash. It then relays input from the terminal to the program and output from the program to the terminal. It opens an invisible Windows console window and runs the wrapped program in it.
Winpty is a wrapper program that works as a translator between Windows programs and MSYS2 terminals. Anything more complicated, like colored text, TUIs and line editing, is a lottery - it can work, it can break. MSYS2 allows some inter-operation between a MSYS2 program and Windows console and between a Windows program and MSYS2 terminal emulators.
This matching is not mandatory though, as bash can be run in a Windows console and cmd can be run in mintty. Likewise, when you open a mintty window, you'll probably see the bash shell running inside and waiting for your commands. The "DOS window" in Windows is actually a combination of a Windows console and the Windows shell ( cmd, command line). A shell is the actual program that reads commands from the user and runs them. ShellsĪ distinct category of programs is shells. It provides the back-end to the Windows Console API. The Windows console ( conhost) does the same for Windows programs. There are other terminal emulators in Cygwin, but they're not provided in MSYS2. It provides the necessary POSIX interfaces to MSYS2 programs. Mintty is a terminal emulator built for MSYS2 programs. draw the characters from the programs as corresponding glyphs on the screen). accept keypresses from the user and send corresponding characters to the program) and output (e.g. Terminals are programs that interface with console programs and facilitate their input (e.g. In the POSIX world, REPLs are often programmed using the readline library and TUIs using the ncurses library. MSYS2/POSIX programs use in-band terminal sequences, while Windows programs use out-of-band calls to the Windows Console API. when a program employs a REPL or uses colored output or draws TUIs, the two systems are fundamentally different.
#BEST WINDOWS TERMINAL POSIX PORTABLE#
it's not interactive), then the program's I/O should be easily portable between Windows, MSYS2 and other platforms.
If reading and writing simple text is the only thing a program does (i.e. non-MSYS2 ones) console programs both use character streams to read data from the user and to display data to the user. MSYS2 (more generally POSIX) and regular Windows (i.e. Note that where we say MSYS2 below, it usually denotes Cygwin as well. If the reader has any corrections or clarifications, please post to the mailing list. The following information is our best understanding and our best attempt at explaining it. Note that this topic is not simple and there are many factors that can cause differences in observed behavior ( TERM, LANG, LC_*.). GUI (graphical, windowed) programs fall outside of the scope of this text. This is a basic explanation of how console programs work in Cygwin and MSYS2.
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