mintty is a free and open source terminal emulator for Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows.

It features a native Windows user interface and does not require a display server; its terminal emulation is aimed to be compatible with xterm.

[2] Mintty is based on the terminal emulation and Windows frontend parts of PuTTY, but improves on them in a number of ways,[3] particularly regarding xterm compatibility.

[4] Advantages over Cygwin's previous default console include a more flexible user interface and closer adherence to Unix standards and conventions.

Since it is not based on the standard Windows console, however, programs written specifically for that do not work correctly in mintty.