Improve support for native console programs

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Start the Win32 Python (not the Cygwin port) inside mintty

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
The interactive Python prompt should be displayed. Instead, nothing happens
and the shell remains suspended until I press Ctrl-C.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
0.3.5-1

Please provide any additional information below.
Win32 Python is works fine under Console2
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/), which is a different Windows
terminal emulator.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by sami.kyo...@gmail.com on 17 Feb 2009 at 3:07

[orgads]

After digging into this issue, I have a few insights:

• When an application is executed, mintty uses msys2/cygwin forkpty(), which creates pipes that are used to read/write to/from the application. These pipes are created using CreateNamedPipe (in fhandler.tty and indirectly in pipe.cc)
• cygwin/msys has its own libc, it doesn't use msvcrt, so the hack used in Git (and other MinGW products) cannot be used here.

There are several projects that enable a pipe to become a virtual console. These 2 projects use an intermediate stub for that.

It looks complicated to integrate it though...

[mintty]

Thanks for looking into this.
I'm not sure where exactly the quoted Git code is hooked into and whether it has any impact on a Git application when running in mintty.
In general, such a console gateway would need to be hooked into cygwin, not mintty. We'd have to find the place where to hook it in, and where and how to distinguish cygwin applications from native Windows applications.
If that succeeds, console I/O could be redirected with pty I/O, and also character set transformation should be applied on that occasion. (An additional challenge might be signal handling.)
That's basically all I can contribute, I don't feel like digging into this Windows console stuff. If you find a working solution, I'm sure you'll earn a cygwin gold star, in addition to an entry in the mintty credits list.

[dragon788]

Msys2 has a winpty application that seems to do a lot of this.

On Jun 17, 2016, 11:40 AM, at 11:40 AM, mintty notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks for looking into this.
I'm not sure where exactly the quoted Git code is hooked into and
whether it has any impact on a Git application when running in mintty.
In general, such a console gateway would need to be hooked into cygwin,
not mintty. We'd have to find the place where to hook it in, and where
and how to distinguish cygwin applications from native Windows
applications.
If that succeeds, console I/O could be redirected with pty I/O, and
also character set transformation should be applied on that occasion.
(An additional challenge might be signal handling.)
That's basically all I can contribute, I don't feel like digging into
this Windows console stuff. If you find a working solution, I'm sure
you'll earn a cygwin gold star, in addition to an entry in the mintty
credits list.

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#56 (comment)

[mintty]

Sure, you can use winpty or some similar wrappers in cygwin as well, but you'd need to invoke them explicitly with every native program activation.
The goal would be to have a wrapper like winpty hook in automatically within cygwin whenever a non-cygwin console application is started.

[e4lam]

The old google website is gone and I need to recompile conin for the latest cygwin. Where can I find the source code for it?

[mintty]

https://github.com/mintty/utils

[chaosreload]

I found when I use windows-native redis-cli.exe, mintty hangs and crash totally, while other interactive programs just hang and you can use Ctrl + C to stop the program