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From: "Gary R. Van Sickle" <g DOT r DOT vansickle AT att DOT net>
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Subject: RE: MinTTY
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 05:52:03 -0600
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> From: Gary R. Van Sickle
> 
> Hey Andy,
> 
> After a thorough 2-minute evaluation, I can give you the 
> following feedback:
> 
> 1.  Good work.
> 2.  Super fast.
> 3.  Cut and paste in a Unixoid terminal for Cygwin finally 
> conforms to Windows norms (AKA "The One True Way").  That 
> alone is worth it.
> 4.  I wasn't getting color from ls, but that appears to be a 
> termcap/terminfo/wrong-bash-invocation issue, as your 
> screenshots clearly show color support.
> 5.  It needs a regular Windows installer.
> 5a. I'm good with Windows installers.  You want I should whip 
> one up for you?
> 
> This will likely become my default terminal unless a more 
> thorough evaluation turns up some showstopper.  Excellent work!

Ok, more feedback after some more extensive use:

- Yeah, the no color thing was solved by putting the standard "bash --login
-i" on the shortcut's command line.  That would be a nice one to have in the
configuration dialogs, but I don't see how you avoid the registry in that
case.  Maybe just going with "bash --login -i" as the default if you don't
tell it otherwise would be a 90% solution.  I don't recall what Setup.exe's
Shortcut capabilities are, but if it's capable enough, the setup package
could tack that on the end when it generates a shortcut for it.
- The ability to configure it via dialogs, especially such 21st century
things as fg/bg/cursor colors and the font and point size to use, is most
excellent and most welcome.
- From the web page: "Mousewheel events can be sent as arrow keys. (This
allows mousewheel scrolling e.g. in less.)"  All I get is dings, and I don't
see any documentation as to how to set this up.
- OMG FULL-SCREEN MODE!  Where we're going, we don't need roads!  Dude, if
you tell me that it uses DirectX and a multi-hundred-dollar video card to
throw up a full-screen 80x24 text interface I will laugh for a week ;-)!
- I don't know if this is good, bad, ugly, or indifferent, but:

	Urxvt:
	$ set | grep TERM
	COLORTERM=rxvt-xpm
	TERM=rxvt-unicode

	Native Windows console:
	$ set | grep TERM
	TERM=cygwin

	MinTTY:
	$ set | grep TERM
	TERM=xterm


Suggestions:

- It should default to "Show scrollbar" being on.  For a while there I
thought I didn't have a scrollback buffer.
- The default Lucida 9-point seems rather too small to me.  Now, my eyes are
no spring chickens anymore, but even so, I think 12 point would be a better
default.
- When you open the Options dialog, it takes two clicks to select one of the
option catagories in the tree pane on the left, as if the first is getting
ignored for some reason.
- It doesn't handle resizing correctly.  I.e., with my urxvt-X.exe+Xwin
setup, if I do "echo $PATH" (which goes way over 80 chars) and then I resize
the window, the previously-printed path gets re-layed-out to fill the entire
client area.  With MinTTY, that doesn't happen.  No relayout happens on
either increasing or decreasing the window width (and hence the number of
columns).  Subsequently printed output does however take the new number of
columns into account.  To me, this is the most significant issue I've seen
so far.
- I don't see a config option to set the number of lines of scrollback
buffer.  Whatever it is defaulting to seems like plenty, but it would be
nice to have that in the config dialogs.


Verdict:

I think everyone would win if this replaced the default Cygwin console-based
terminal, even as-is.  Just the reasonable copy/paste behavior and the
ability to resize the window by sensical means close the deal in my book.
Again Andy, good work.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle


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