Contour vs mintty

Contour is a free terminal emulator for everyday use, designed for people who want control over terminal workflows. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows. GPU-accelerated rendering and high-DPI support accompany text features such as font ligatures, Unicode grapheme clusters, and colored emoji. Users can split panes, use vi-like modes for navigation and selection, and jump through history with vertical markers. Sessions can persist beyond a terminal window and be reattached locally or over a network. Contour interoperates with tmux control mode in both directions, but not its -CC mode. It also supports clickable links, inline Sixel images, OSC 52 clipboard setting, and profiles for color schemes and login shells. TCP connections use TLS encryption and require a token. Daemon mode is experimental, and its command-line flags and wire protocol may change. The project website remains in draft mode. Contour is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

mintty is a free Windows terminal emulator for Cygwin, MSYS, MSYS2, related projects, and WSL. It provides xterm-compatible emulation and DEC terminal screen controls, with 256 colours, True Colour, Unicode, bidirectional text, emoji, Arabic shaping, image display, Sixel, ReGIS, and Tektronix 4014 graphics emulation. Input features include configurable shortcuts, Unicode composition, AltGr, Windows IME, mouse modes, selection, copy and paste, drag and drop, and Ctrl-click opening of files or URLs. Window features include virtual tabs, session switching, fullscreen, transparency, multiple monitors, and high DPI. Options can be supplied on the command line or in a text configuration file, without registry entries. mintty is the default Cygwin Terminal, installed by default in MSYS2, included with Git for Windows as Git Bash, and able to host WSL. It omits PuTTY networking functionality; the project points to OpenSSH and inetutils packages instead. The listed latest release is 3.8.3.