When comparing mintty vs tmux, the Slant community recommends mintty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” mintty is ranked 9th while tmux is ranked 15th. 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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Easily split panes
There is a keyboard shortcut that makes it easy to split a window and create more panes.
Pro Windows linked to sessions
tmux calls the individual shell instances windows. They are displayed like tabs in the status line. These windows can be shared between different sessions, so that any given shell instance can be in any number of tmux sessions used for different purposes or by different users. This allows configurations like the following example: User A: wAB, wA1, wA2; User B: wB1, wAB, wB2
Pro Preserve the state
As long as you don't close your session, you may even lose your SSH connection, it'll keep your state just as it was. So you can resume where you left off (via tmux attach
).
Pro Maximize screen space
As a tiling window manager, it'll make use of all the space. As you have multiple workspaces and you can resize, etc. you can adjust to see what matters most.
Pro Frequently updated
Tmux is in a state of constant development. Updates are frequent and bug reports usually get an answer within days.
Pro Customizable
Open ~/.tmux.conf to get started. You can customize keybindings, the bottom status bar, color schemes, the clock screen, your time zone, and more.
Pro Mouse support
Mouse support can optionally be enabled, allowing e.g. scrolling with the mouse wheel, or switching panes with mouse clicks.
Pro Only need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts and commands to make much headway
Cons
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.
Con Poorly designed key binding
Counter-intuitive keyboard shortcuts make tmux very hard to use and learn.
Con Bad scrolling support
Con No builtin telnet or serial support
It's considered bloat by the maintainers and for this reason there's no builtin support for them.