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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:56:44 +0000
From: Andy Koppe <andy DOT koppe AT gmail DOT com>
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Subject: Re: MinTTY
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Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:

> -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.  

MinTTY's current behaviour is the same as rxvt's and xterm's, and I 
think it makes sense not to execute the profile when starting a new 
terminal from within an existing session using just 'rxvt&' or 'mintty&'.

> 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.

That's definitely the way to go.

> - 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.

Yep, unfortunately no docs yet. (Issue 2.)

When on the alternate screen and not in application mouse mode, 
mousewheel-up/down sends arrow-up/down combined with the scroll modifier 
configured under Keys, so with the default Shift you get ^[[1;2A and 
^[[1;2B. (Replace the 2 with 3 for Alt or 5 for Ctrl).

The thinking behind that is that this replaces the terminal scrollback 
when on the alternate screen, and that plain arrows mean cursor movement 
rather than scrolling. And a word of warning: the feature doesn't work 
in Vista when the scrollbar is shown. Looks like the inactive scrollbar 
is swallowing the mousewheel events.

Activate mousewheel scrolling in 'less' with the following two lines in 
your .lesskey file. Don't forget to run 'lesskey' to compile it into 
less's internal format.

\eO1;2A back-line
\eO1;2B forw-line

Btw, it's 'O' rather than '[' here, because 'less' switches into 
"application cursor key" mode. (Yep, the world of terminals is full of 
fascinating yet strangely pointless details like that.)

> - 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 ;-)!

Don't worry, it's plain ol' Win32. Another goodie from PuTTY. Combine 
fullscreen with transparency and an auto-hiding taskbar for maximum geek 
cred. :)

> 	MinTTY:
> 	$ set | grep TERM
> 	TERM=xterm

The proper thing to do would be to set TERM to "mintty", but that would 
require termcap and terminfo entries. I guess that might be worth 
considering for a MinTTY package, although iirc KDE's Konsole and 
GNOME's terminal also just set it to "xterm", because like MinTTY they 
aim to be compatible with (the default config of) xterm. Would make life 
easier for everyone to settle on that as a standard.

> - It should default to "Show scrollbar" being on.  For a while there I
> thought I didn't have a scrollback buffer.

Agreed, switching it off by default took the minimalism a bit too far. 
Issue 19.

> - 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.

I'd realised that before seeing your mail and already increased it to 
10point in 0.3.1. That's also the default in PuTTY and Windows Notepad, 
and pretty similar in size to the bitmap font in the Windows console. 
Obviously matter of personal preference though, hence the option. (No 
kidding.)

> - 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.

Ah yes, I never did get round to investigate that one. Issue 20.

> - 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.

Plain rxvt and xterm do the same, and it would be quite a big and risky 
change in code I don't know much about to implement relayouting.

Simon Tatham has a PuTTY wish for an apparently simpler version of this:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/resize-no-truncate.html

(Btw, resizes are signalled to applications, so relayouting does work in 
apps that handle that signal, e.g. less.)

> - 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.

I've rather arbitrarily fixed it to 16k. Another one for the docs. I 
can't really see the point in making this a config dialog option though. 
Perhaps a config-file-only option?

 > Again Andy, good work.

Thank you very much for your encouraging and comprehensive feedback!

Andy


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