[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
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