After some discussion with Corinna, I'm thinking about making a change to the tty naming in Cygwin as part of the removal of CYGWIN=tty.
(In case you haven't noticed, CYGWIN=tty, is no longer supported in snapshots. If you do have the tty option set you get one warning per session telling you to unset it.) Since the only thing using Cygwin's "tty layer" will now be ptys, I'd like to rename /dev/ttyN to /dev/ptyN. I've already added /dev/consN support for consoles but I'd like to change that so that consoles are represented as /dev/ttyN instead. Obviously ps(1) will need to be changed too. Corinna suggested that I should send a query here to see if anyone knows if this proposed change will affect any existing applications which use ptys like mintty, emacs, xterm, rxvt, or screen. Does anyone see any problems with this? Problems can include large wails of protest from the user community if you think that will happen. I can't predict if this will be the case or not. I don't know the purity of doing things this way will outweigh any end user confusion. Or even if there will be that much end user confusion. cgf
