When comparing mintty vs Babun, the Slant community recommends mintty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” mintty is ranked 9th while Babun is ranked 14th. 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 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 Comes with bash and zsh out of the box
Babun comes with both bash and zsh out of the box. This gives both beginners and advanced users the choice of which shell to run.
Pro Comes with a package manager
Babun come with a package manager called Pact, which is an extremely simple yet powerful package manager similar to apt-get
or yum
for Linux.
Pro Easy access to powerful zsh features through integrated oh-my-zsh
Oh-my-zsh is a dead simple configuration and management for zsh (which is a pretty powerful shell), allowing even first time users to take advantage of the most powerful features it offers.
Pro Extends Cygwin functionality
Babun is built on top of Cygwin, meaning that Unix or Linux applications can be compiled and run on a Windows operating system from within a Linux-like interface.
Pro Decent, out-of-the-box remoting to Unix and others
256 color xterm is simple, but many programs simply do it wrong. Babun uses well-established command-line programs that do it right, and which then wrap them in a nicely themed package.
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 Dead project
Babun is not maintained and uses an old version of Cygwin from 2015.
Con Cannot exit node.js programs
When trying to exit a node program using Ctrl-C, the process doesn't actually exit.
Con No tabs
Babun has no support for tabs.
Con No spinner when installing packages with gems or npm
Con Does not work with Ansible
Executing Ansible modules (which helps configure and manage computers that combine multi-node software deployment) causes errors to arise.