mintty

mintty is a lightweight, portable application that was developed so that it can replace PuTTY by serving you as a terminal emulator for Cygwin (the Unix-like environment for Windows operating systems) on your computer. This tool was designed to help seasoned computer users such as software developers, coders and programmers get the most out of their setup.

It is worth mentioning that, in a similar manner to other pty-based Cygwin terminals, this application cannot possibly server as a complete replacement for Windows' native Command Prompt utility and can only serves some specific purposes.

mintty comes with a native Windows user interface and does not require a display server to run on the target computer. More so, the terminal emulation of this application aims to be compatible with xterm, which is an improvement from the terminal emulation and Windows frontend components of PuTTY.

The processes running within mintty communicate with the help of the POSIX API (which is provided by Cygwin), while the user interface is implemented making use of the Windows API.

It provides users with a whole bunch of cool features such as 256-colour and True-Colour support, wide range of character encoding support, Emoji support, alternative fonts, colour schemes, drag & drop capabilities as well as virtual tabs.