Mintty as a terminal for Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL.

Overview

Run the installer to install

• wsltty package components (see below) in the user’s application directory (where WSL is also installed)
• an empty wsltty “home directory” to enable storage of a mintty config file
• a Desktop Shortcut and a Start Menu Shortcut to start WSL with a login bash in the Windows user profile directory; to start in the Linux home directory instead, add a cd command to your Linux $HOME/.profile script
• context menu entries for Windows Explorer to start WSL with a bash in the respective directory
• a script wsl.bat to invoke wsltty manually; copy the script from %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty to %SYSTEMROOT%\System32 if desired
• an uninstall script that can be invoked manually to remove shortcuts and context menu entries

Configuration

Command line scripts wsl.bat and wsl~.bat

• To enable invocation of this script from WIN+R or from cmd.exe, copy it from %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty into %SYSTEMROOT%\System32. (The package does not do this to avoid trouble with missing admin privileges.)
• To start the terminal in the current directory when calling the script from the command line, modify it (or a copy for this purpose) and remove the final -l parameter.
• To enforce starting in your Linux home directory, do either of:
  • On Linux side, add a cd command to your $HOME/.profile.
  • Use wsl~.bat instead of wsl.bat (or rename it as desired).

Desktop shortcut and Start menu shortcut

To enforce starting in your Linux home directory, do either of:

• On Linux side, add a cd command to your $HOME/.profile.
• Use the shortcut Bash ~ on UoW in Mintty instead.

Mintty settings

Mintty can maintain its configuration file in various locations, with the following precedence:

• file given with mintty option -c
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.minttyrc
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.config\mintty\config
• %APPDATA%\mintty\config
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\etc\minttyrc

Note that the %APPDATA%\mintty\config option provides the possibility to maintain common mintty settings for various installations (like wsltty, Cygwin, MinGW/msys, Git for Windows, MinEd for Windows).

Components

For mintty, see the Mintty homepage.

It is based on Cygwin and includes its runtime library (sources).

For interacting with WSL, it uses wslbridge.