mintty-standalone

A standalone mintty minimal installation for Windows Console CLI (e.g. CMD, Windows PowerShell) without msys2 or cygwin.

Motivation

Color Emoji in Windows 7 Terminal (originally posted as a Reddit thread)

On Windows, input/output Unicode in a console is tricky. The legacy console (conhost.exe) is buggy and no one want to use it. Nowadays, we have Windows Terminal, but it requires Windows 10 (build 19041) or later.

There have been several workarounds at the moment, e.g. ConEmu, ConsoleZ, etc, but they can't show Color Emoji on Windows 7.

Color Emoji requires Color Font (aka Chromatic font) support. Unfortunately it is a new feature from Windows 8.1. Any program on Windows 7 that uses GDI/Uniscribe/DirectWrite to render font directly will never show Color Emoji, even though you have selected correct Font (COLR/CPAL).

However, some programs are exceptions, such as Firefox, Telegram, etc. They use their own methods for rendering Color Font.

Mintty is another such example. It renders Color Emoji as graphics, so Color Font is not necessary.

A Screen recording

mintty-color-emoji.mp4

P.s. The approach also supports FarManager, I didn't show it in the demo though. Being able to display Color Emoji make console apps look nicer. Might be more apps you can find?

How to achieve that?

There are 3 ways currently.

1. Use my standalone mintty minimal installation from this repository
   • Copy mintty-3.7.0 to C:/green/mintty/.
   • Double click mintty-standalone-winpty-65001-cmd.cmd, it should open a mintty window with CMD.
   • If you'd like to run Power Shell, make sure Windows Power Shell v5.1 has been installed, then double click mintty-standalone-winpty-65001-powershell5.cmd.
2. Create the standalone mintty minimal installation from upstream by yourself
   • Create mintty-3.7.0 folder in C:/green/mintty.
   • Download msys2-x86_64-latest.tar.xz.
   • Copy the corresponding mintty files to C:/green/mintty/mintty-3.7.0 (compare the directory structure).
   • Download winpty-0.4.3-msys2-2.7.0-x64.tar.gz.
   • Copy the corresponding winpty files toC:/green/mintty/mintty-3.7.0 (compare the directory structure).
   • Create minttyrc in C:\green\mintty\mintty-3.7.0\etc and config as your need (see minttyrc, integrated fonts and mintty-tips).
   • Create emoji graphics. You can copy them from mine directly or follow the tips to create by yourself.
   • Double click mintty-standalone-winpty-65001-cmd.cmd or mintty-standalone-winpty-65001-powershell5.cmd.
3. Use msys2 with mintty + winpty
   • You will get additional bash and zsh functionality. The drawback is not as lightweight as the standalone installation above. Also some apps might have path style problem.

Hope this post can help those who encounter issues with Unicode, Font and Emoji in the Windows 7 Console.