does not play well with minTTY on windows

[malcolmw]

Haskeline, at least when baked into a Windows-native build of ghc, appears not to work well with the minTTY terminal emulator. Neither the arrow keys, nor vi key bindings do anything useful - they simply corrupt the buffer being passed to the underlying program by adding odd non-printable characters.

I think the cause is similar to the reason that Windows-native Python does not work interactively in minTTY without special options. To quote http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=56

"This is due to MinTTY being based on Cygwin pty's, which do not play well with Windows console apps. [...] basically it's because the pty emulation is based on pipes, which means that a Win32 application running in MinTTY sees a pipe rather than a console as its input, so it behaves differently."

For instance, the _isatty() call will return False when run inside minTTY. The webpage goes into some more details, but I think the main problem is that Windows-native (rather than Cygwin) programs have no API available to them to manipulate a "pseudo terminal".

I'm not certain the issue is fixable in Haskeline, but thought it worth noting, even if only for googleability.

[judah]

Thanks for the report; see also ticket #1. Originally I planned to support Cygwin terminals by way of versions of GHC that were built against the Cygwin runtime. Unfortunately, that possibility hasn't been supported for a while now.

I'll try looking into whether there's a more lightweight alternative.