Here’s the Deal

mintty vs CLink

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When comparing mintty vs CLink, the Slant community recommends mintty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” mintty is ranked 9th while CLink is ranked 38th. 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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Common Questions

What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?

mintty

CLink

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
Transforms cmd.exe into something bearable

Cmd.exe is still irreplaceable for many tasks on Windows. This makes the experience less painful.

Pro
Can easily search in history

The user can search in history by simply pressing Ctrl+R.

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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
Supports cmd.exe not the successor platform

It's for cmd.exe which was abandoned by Microsoft in the favor of PowerShell. Using PowerShell is more effective than cmd.exe even with CLink, unfortunatelly.