Hi Thomas, I'm very sorry for replying so late.
On Sun, 5 Oct 2025 10:15:55 +0200 Thomas Wolff wrote: > Am 10.09.2025 um 11:21 schrieb Thomas Wolff via Cygwin: > > [Reposting by response from cygwin-developers] > > > > I wrote: > >> The ancient conhost and also the initial conpty implementation of > >> Windows were obstacles to using terminal feature from Windows > >> applications. > >> There are nuisances like mangled or ignored character attributes, > >> terminal reports not passed through etc. > >> While there is an updated Windows conpty layer being developed as > >> part of the Windows terminal project, it is not yet deployed with > >> Windows 11 and will probably not be deployed with Windows 10 at all > >> anymore (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/17452). > >> Various terminals had to fight with these problems and some found a > >> solution. > >> According to > >> https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel/issues/199#issuecomment-3181728693 > >> it is possible to inject a specific version of conpty so to supersede > >> the Windows-installed conhost.exe. > >> > >> I've tried to apply that to mintty by just preloading a conpty.dll > >> before calling forkpty for the terminal child process but that has no > >> effect. > >> The procedure seems to be: > >> try LoadLibrary("conpty.dll"), (if not successful, fallback to > >> GetModuleHandle("kernel32") instead) to retrieve GetProcAddress for > >> CreatePseudoConsole, ResizePseudoConsole, ClosePseudoConsole, and > >> then somehow (?) use those while calling CreateProcess. > >> The latter is woven into the cygwin library and I don't think it's a > >> good idea to clone that out of cygwin for a patched process creation > >> in mintty. > >> > >> My question/suggestion: > >> Can a cygwin mode switch to a selected conpty library instead of the > >> default one please? My idea would be to configure this per process > >> with the environment variable CYGWIN. Like its error_start= setting, > >> it could have a conpty= setting to configure the filename to be used > >> for conpty when starting a subprocess. > >> That would allow mintty to inject a modern conpty when calling a > >> Windows application (e.g. wsl.exe). > >> > > Thomas > It would also help if someone writes a small wrapper that loads a local > conpty.dll version, runs CreatePseudoConsole from it, and invokes > wsl.exe (likely with CreateProcess). I somehow fail to get this working, > being umfamiliar with Windows intrinsics... I'm not sure what is the advantage of dynamic conpty loading. Does this allow use newer functionality than using conhost.exe? Or something else? -- Takashi Yano <[email protected]> -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
