- WSLtty (https://github.com/mintty/wsltty)
Better than the Windows Terminal for WSL. You can work in tmux without getting strange visual artifacts, and allows you to view sixel graphics in console! Fair warning though, I only installed it about two weeks ago, so I can't claim I've battle-tested it though.
ETA: The one thing it doesn't allow me to do is change font programmatically, which would allow me to switch fonts to render non-english characters. I'm very much a beginner in terminals, so if anyone has a solution to this, I would love to hear it.
In Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?mintty
wsltty
C2016–2022
mintty / wsltty
wsltty
Mintty as a terminal for Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL
25Distinct people
31Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
3.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Mintty as a terminal for Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Mouse events still don't pass through to tmux which makes it unusable in every day usage. In other words, if you use tmux and have Vim open and try to click into Vim or any…
nickjj used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year31 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-10-13 10:02:51 UTC to 2022-12-29 18:32:12 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 1 | 14 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Mintty as a terminal for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
Overview
WSLtty components
wsltty package components (see below) in the user’s local application folder
%LOCALAPPDATA%
a wsltty configuration directory in the user’s application folder %APPDATA%
(“home”-located configuration files from a previously installed version
will be migrated to the new default location)
Start Menu shortcuts to start WSL terminals
Desktop shorcut to start a terminal for the default WSL distribution
*.bat scripts to invoke WSL terminals from the command line
optional context menu entries for Windows Explorer to start WSL terminals in the respective folder
install/uninstall context menu items from Start Menu subfolder WSLtty
Launching WSL
Since wsltty 3.8.0, mintty launches WSL using the native Windows launcher
gateway wsl.exe by default.
Proper display in certain cases depends on an up-to-date version of the
Windows conpty layer. Its version currently deployed with Windows has
unfortunately still some problems. There are two ways to fix this:
Revert to the previous launching method for now. The problem is that
this way of launching WSL does not appear to work on some users’ systems.
For this solution, configure this in config file %APPDATA%/wsltty/config.
WSLbridge=2
Update the Windows conpty layer manually, by replacing
%SYSTEMROOT%/System32/conhost.exe following the instructions in the
mintty wiki, section Interaction with WSL.
Launcher and display interworking background
The approach to use wsl.exe directly used to fail because the
conhost layer hooked into the workflow used to obstruct transparent
terminal operation in multiple ways.
The conhost layer has meanwhile been modernised, including the conpty
layer, and its enforced detour through the Windows console API has
been dropped, in the course of the Windows Terminal project.
The new conhost, however, has not yet been deployed with Windows
(as of summer 2025) and will probably not be deployed with Windows 10 anymore.
So in order to get fully transparent terminal interaction between WSL
and wsltty, the updated conhost needs to be patched into Windows
manually, following the instructions linked above,
to patch OpenConsole into your Windows as conhost replacement.
The wslbridge approach
To connect to WSL, wsltty used wslbridge2, which uses undocumented
Windows APIs that have been changed various times, so wslbridge2 needed
to catch up with incompatible changes, particularly to support WSL V2.
(See e.g. issue #343; to work with WSL V2, wsltty 2.0.0 needed a WSL update
to release 1.3.17.)
Since release 3.0.5, WSLtty requires Windows version 1809 (the November 2018 release).
By end of 2024, wsltty works again with recent updates of the WSL subsystem.
Configuration option WSLbridge=2 switches back to the previous
wslbridge launching approach; the wslbridge2 gateway is still deployed
with wsltty for that matter. (If for a very old Windows 10 version you
still need the original wslbridge gateway, set WSLbridge=1 and
deploy it manually.)
Installation from this repository
WSLtty installer (Download standalone installation)
From the release downloads,
run the wsltty-VERSION-x86_64-install.exe installer to install
the components listed above. Make sure to select a 64-bit installer
on a 64-bit system.
If Windows complains with a “Windows protected your PC” popup,
you may need to click “Run anyway” to proceed with the installation.
You may need to open the Properties of the installer first, tab “General”
section “Security” (if available) and select “Unblock”,
to enable the “Run anyway” button.
WSLtty Portable installer
For a portable installation, e.g. on a USB stick, choose the
“-install-portable.exe” file for download. Installation will prompt
for a portable installation folder interactively.
For example, choosing U:\opt will create and use folder
U:\opt\wsltty both as installation directory and configuration directory.
Portable installation does not install any start menu or desktop shortcuts
and no context menu entries. It creates a shortcut in the selected
portable installation folder to start the default WSL distribution.
Note: For an update installation, either the parent directory or the target
directory itself can be selected.
Note: If you rename or move the installation directory, the icon of the
“WSL Terminal Portable” shortcut will not work anymore; re-run the
install-portable.bat script in the installation folder to refresh it.
Installation from archive
In case a local anti-virus guard barfs about the wsltty installer, the
release also contains a .cab file. Download it, open it, extract its files
to some temporary deployment directory, and invoke install.bat from there,
or install-portable.bat for a portable installation.
Quiet installer
The wsltty-VERSION-x86_64-install-quiet.exe installer is intended for
integration in another installation framework.
Installation from source repository
Checkout the wsltty repository, or download the source archive, unpack and rename the directory to wsltty.
Install Alpine WSL from the Microsoft Store.
Invoke make build, then make install.
Note this has to be done within a Cygwin environment. A minimal Cygwin
environment for this purpose would be installed with the
Cygwin installer
from cygwin.com,
with additional packages make, gcc-g++, unzip, zoo, patch, (lcab).
Build installers
Install a minimal Cygwin environment plus the additional packages as
listed for «Installation from source repository».
Invoke make pkg or just make.
Installation to non-default locations
(For experts)
Within the installation process, provide parameters to the script install.bat.
The optional first parameter designates the installation target,
the optional second parameter designates the configuration directory.
Installation with other package management environments
Note: These are 3rd-party packages, not managed by this repository.
Windows Package Manager
(Check package)
To install wsltty from the
Windows Package Manager Community Re
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
31 sourcesMouse events still don't pass through to tmux which makes it unusable in every day usage. In other words, if you use tmux and have Vim open and try to click into Vim or any tmux window, nothing happens. This also happens without tmux too if you're just using terminal Vim. It's like the event gets absorbed and thrown out.
I highly recommend to check out WSLtty if you're interested in a good WSL terminal: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
It has equally as low input latency, really good keyboard shortcut support, clickable URLs, tmux works perfectly (with and without the mouse), it's rock solid, uses almost no resources, has smaller / less distracting window borders vs MS' terminal and it has lots of themes. I've been using it for full time development with tmux + terminal Vim for almost a year now and it hasn't failed me yet.
In Windows Terminal Preview 0.9I mainly use WSL within Windows but here's a bunch of general Windows tools I use: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use
The productivity focused short version is:
DexPot[0] for creating hotkey driven virtual desktops (similar to how i3 launches and switches between them)
Ditto[1] for multiple clipboards (searchable and has multiple paste types, much better than what comes with Windows 10)
Keypirinha[2] for launching apps and folders with fuzzing searching (IMO much better than what comes with Windows 10)
AutoHotKey[3] for remapping global hotkeys and filling in gaps for specific things you want to do
wsltty[4] for a low input latency rock solid terminal (best paired with tmux for tabs / splits and buffer searches)
There's in depth blog posts and videos on how all of these work in the link at the start of this comment. I've been
Read the rest
using Windows as a primary dev environment for ~20 years and the last half of that has been using it for Linux based development (initially with VMs but now with WSL and Docker).
[0]: https://www.dexpot.de/?lang=en
[1]: http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/
[2]: http://keypirinha.com/
[3]: https://www.autohotkey.com/
[4]: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
Have you tried the mintty solution for WSL?
https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
I've found it to be the most consistent and performant. Still not the same as being in a native Linux environment, of course, but it's the closest I've been able to get in Windows.
In The Future of Docker Desktop for WindowsMy main issue with ConEmu was output performance. Paging through files in Vim over SSH was painfully slow. I recently switched the wsltty [0] and after changing some display prefences (Font: Consolas 9pt, Theme: dracula, Cursor: blinking block) I'm really satisfied with it as a terminal. Vim paging performance is greatly improved, and it's smaller and faster than Hyper.
Also, copy/paste works perfectly and I found that fewer of the default keybindings conflict with those in my shell, tmux and vim.
[0] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In The Future of Docker Desktop for WindowsThe situation for terminal emulators is still bad on Windows.
Those web-based ones have no problems with fancy font features like powerline icons or ligatures but they still have a limitation when it comes to color support. [1] Fluent seems to be affected from this as well.
The other important feature for me is tmux with mouse support. To my knowledge, only WSLtty [2] does this right. It lacks support for font ligatures but I value a functional tmux more than some ligature eye candy.
I still hope that Microsoft will improve their own conhost.exe in further updates. Also, the upcoming 1903 update will improve the color support those web-based terminal emulators.
[1] https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1968
[2] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Fluent Terminal – Open-source, native Windows 10 tabbed terminalI've been using this and seems to have all the functionality you'd want.
https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY SettingsThanks!
With msys2, pacman -Syu then pacman -Su will update your minty to 2.9.9, which according to https://github.com/mintty/wsltty/issues/145 should include the 30 ms patch.
It feels quite smooth to me, but I haven't done measurements
In Terminal latency (2017)You might like wsltty (https://github.com/mintty/wsltty). It's mintty for WSL which in essence is putty with just the terminal capabilites.
In PuTTY 0.71 released, fixing security vulnerabilitiesThis is unnecessarily harsh. You can install wsltty[0] and get a real bash prompt with posix and forward slashes if you want.
WSL is not perfect, but it's good enough for a lot of use cases if you're stuck on Windows.
[0]: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Microsoft completes GitHub acquisitionMintty works great for me. Their wsltty installer works wonders: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulatorMintty + tmux. It's how I survive Windows.
Also: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Inside the Windows ConsoleI've been using WSL + wsltty [1] + Xming [2] for months and didn't encounter major issues. wsltty also added support to the Microsoft Store version recently.
For Xming, simply set DISPLAY in shell and local GUI programs just work, as well as SSH X forwarding.
[1] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
(EDIT: typo)
In Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10Cygwin still seems to be the go-to for any POSIX apps that need to interact with the actual Windows environment. For example, wslbridge[1] that connects wsltty[2] to WSL compiles the frontend component under cygwin.
[1]: https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
[2]: https://github.com/rprichard/wslbridge
In Windows for Linux NerdsI use wsltty which is mintty for the WSL.
https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
In Windows for Linux NerdsShowing the 15 most recent of 31 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.