When comparing Xshell 6 vs mintty, the Slant community recommends mintty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” mintty is ranked 9th while Xshell 6 is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose mintty is:
Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc.
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Pros
Pro Connections management
Pro Has tabs
Pro Compose bar to send a string to multiple servers at once
Pro Local shell interface to control Xshell
Pro Great option for enterprises
Xshell 6 caters to enterprises with features such as multi-tab UI, dynamic port forwarding, scripting support, support for ASCII as well as non-ASCII characters, etc.
Pro Can use any system font
Pro Tunneling bar
Channel monitoring and dynamic port forwarding.
Pro User defined key map support
Pro Task automation with VB script
Pro Support for Cygwin and MSYS
Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc.
Pro Proper support for scrolling in terminal applications
The mouse wheel in mintty actually scrolls the content in man/less/vim, etc.
Pro Xterm-compatible terminal emulation
Xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System.
Pro UTF-8 support
UTF-8 allows for the encoding of all possible characters.
Pro Drag and drop makes for ease of use
The drag and drop function in mintty allows the user to move an item quickly and easily.
Cons
Con Not free
The subscription costs $89 per year.
Con No stable portable version
Any portable version present is wrapper. It moves files from portable folder to appdata and backward, which often cause dataloss

Con No multiple tab support
Con Win32 console API performs poorly
Classic Windows console applications don't work well.
Con No native support for WSL
Cygwin is dead. WSL is amazing, yet Mintty is designed around Cygwin and the WSLtty app to connect Mintty to WSL feels like a hack.
