When comparing ConsoleZ 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 ConsoleZ is ranked 17th. 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 Supports splitting tabs into views
In ConsoleZ, the user can split a tab into different views either horizontally or vertically.
Pro Fullscreen support
ConsoleZ can be opened in fullscreen.
Pro Small, portable installation
Install to OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive and your setting will be consistent everywhere.
Pro Supports typographic ligatures
Typographic ligatures occur when there are two or more letters joined as a single glyph, such as "æ".
Pro Easy transition from Console2
Being a fork of Console2, ConsoleZ is fully compatible. It even recognizes existing Console2 config files, making the transition easier.
Pro Input sent to one view can be sent to all
ConsoleZ allows for grouping of open views (panes) so that if an input is sent to one of them, it can be sent to all views grouped with it automatically.
Pro High DPI
This means that the display screen in ConsoleZ is sharp.
Pro Drop-down animation support
ConsoleZ can be used as a drop-down terminal inspired by the famous Quake terminal. Once opened, it can be toggled with a key of the user's choice. This makes it easier to have access to it from any window instead of having to cycle through all open applications.
Pro Localization support
ConsoleZ is available in French, Russian, German, and Japanese.
Pro Zooming with Ctrl-Mouse
The user can easily zoom by simply pressing Ctrl-Mouse.
Pro Windows 7 Jump List makes the user's life easier
Jump List is a useful feature that allows the user to view recent documents in a program that is pinned to the taskbar.
Pro Snippets
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 You can't scroll up and down for command history as those keys are bound to the scrollbox
Con No way to open pre-created tabs on startup
If you want to setup a certain number of tabs to automatically run pre-defined scripts in ConsoleZ or Console 2, you can't. You have to open everything manually every time you start the application.
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.