How do I upgrade MinTTY in Git for Windows

Question

I appreciate that this is borderline off-topic, but it does "directly involve programming or programming tools" so I figure it's just about OK...

I've just installed a newly downloaded version of Git for Windows, and noticed that in the Options dialog, the title bar says "mintty 2.8.5 is available". According to the About dialog, I currently have version 2.8.4.

I assume it's telling me that there's a new version because I am able to upgrade it myself, but I can't find any information about how to do so. I've downloaded the zip file from mintty.github.io, but don't really want to have to build it manually if I can avoid it.

Is there some way to do this, or is the easiest option just to wait for an updated build of Git For Windows that includes the new version of MinTTY?

Answer 1

mintty is a terminal emulator program available for Cygwin and msys2 environment. In both environment, mintty can be compiled as 32bit and 64bit. Hence it will be easy to deploy if users/package maintainer compile themselves with their own toolchain. Here are the two mainstream toolchain associated with mintty.

• Cygwin: You can search the full package namecygwin package search. Cygwin maintains multiple mirror URLs to download a package. Here is one of the mirror:

  • 32bit: https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/x86/release/mintty/
  • 64bit: https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/x86_64/release/mintty/

• msys2: msys2 also maintains mirror URLs to download. You can browse whole packages list in http://repo.msys2.org/. Open that URL in a browser. As mintty need msys2 dynamic library, it can be found in msys2 directory. Search mintty in these webpages:

  • 32bit: http://repo.msys2.org/msys/i686/
  • 64bit: http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/

To use it in Git-For-Windows, download the mintty tarball file from msys2 links according to your installed one 32bit or 64bit. You can find mintty.exe in that .tar.xz file's usr/bin folder. Extract and place that executable in Git-For-Windows installation folder e.g. C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin.

Note: Mintty need a dynamic library (e.g. cygwin1.dll or msys-2.0.dll) and a shell (e.g. bash.exe, dash.exe etc.) or a command line program to run. And it should be placed in /usr/bin or /bin folder as per your specific environment. For Cygwin specifically, you also need cygwin-console-helper.exe to hide the console window (conhost.exe process). In msys2 environment, mintty version may be lower than the Cygwin one.