mintty

A reliable way to detect the presence of a MinTTY console on Windows

MinTTY is a Windows-specific terminal emulator for the widely used Cygwin and MSYS projects, which provide Unix-like environments for Windows. MinTTY consoles behave differently from native Windows consoles (such as @cmd.exe@ or PowerShell) in many ways, and in some cases, these differences make it necessary to treat MinTTY consoles differently in code. The @mintty@ library provides a simple way to detect if your code in running in a MinTTY console on Windows. It exports @isMinTTY@, which does the right thing 90% of the time (by checking if standard error is attached to MinTTY), and it also exports @isMinTTYHandle@ for the other 10% of the time (when you want to check is some arbitrary handle is attached to MinTTY). As you might expect, both of these functions will simply return @False@ on any non-Windows operating system.

homepage ↗