Can't save options about wsltty

[mintty]

Did you create the symlink inside WSL? That would likely not work because wsltty uses a cygwin runtime environment.

[PhilipDaniels]

Nope. I have had for a long time an existing Cygwin installation, here is a screenshot from its home directory:

I recently installed WSL (creating a user called Phil) and then wsltty. Here is a screenshot of my WSL home directory:

Notice there is no symlink. It is a completely different directory. Yet somehow wsltty seems to be looking in my Cygwin home directory.

[mintty]

WSLtty comes with its own standalone cygwin mini-installation which is different from your own one.
They happen to share the same home directory because you set HOME at Windows level (otherwise you would be getting a different error message, I suppose).
But the wsltty cygwin environment has no /c directory! It seems you either reconfigured your cygdrive prefix or set a symbolic link /c, in either case this is not visible in the wsltty environment.
This does not fully explain, though, why the absolute link target is appended to the link location and /c/Users/pdaniels appears twice in the error message...

[PhilipDaniels]

Correct, I have hacked my Cygwin fstab to remove the cygdrive prefix.

[mintty]

Does it work if you turn this into a relative link?
You could also use a "normal" .minttyrc and include the theme with a ThemeFile option, using a Windows path.

[mintty]

Actually, the error message is correct because in your setup,
'C:\Users\pdaniels\AppData\Local\wsltty' is the root directory of the wsltty standalone cygwin environment,
and
'\c\Users\pdaniels\repos\dotfiles\colors\mintty-themes\SolarizedDark'
is the resolved link which cannot be found in that environment.
Perhaps it would be more useful to report the cygwin path in the error message which would then be
/c/Users/pdaniels/repos/dotfiles/colors/mintty-themes/SolarizedDark
or find some other clever way to be more helpful with such a message;
I could consider the --wsl option to include a hint to the root environment.

[mintty]

Quoting the POSIX path in the error message is not a good idea, especially for wsltty, because it would likely be mistaken for a WSL path (while in fact referring to the wsltty cygwin root).
But mintty can identify and strip off the root prefix.

[PhilipDaniels]

What confused me was why wsltty was looking in that directory at all. The README just mentioned %LOCALAPPDATA% and other variations. I didn't have anything in any of those paths. I thought that Cygwin's mintty and wsltty installations would be completely separate.

[mintty]

Your case is ~/.minttyrc as listed in the mintty manual page. You are right the wsltty project page (README) maps that to %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.minttyrc and does not consider the case that you set HOME at Windows level which would redirect both \home\ cases.
The cygwin installations are indeed completey separate, but by setting HOME, you would at least merge the home directory.

[mintty]

Released 0.7.7. Please recheck.

[josteink]

You are right the wsltty project page (README) maps that to %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.minttyrc

Would it be an option to have mintty create that folder automatically if it does not exist?

As long as that is the same file which is read upon starting mintty, I suspect that will end up giving most users what they expect.

[mintty]

The ...home... location is now obsolete.
0.7.7 changes that to %APPDATA%\wsltty\config and subfolders of %APPDATA%\wsltty should now be created as needed. Please check and report back if anything does not work.

[josteink]

I just tried downloading and installing 0.7.7 from the releases-tab here today, and this is where I experienced this behaviour.

[mintty]

Which behaviour?
Please describe your symptoms in detail.
Since some things have changed, referring vaguely to previous problems does not really tell me what's going on.

[josteink]

Fair enough. Here's my use case:

1. Have a clean machine which has never installed wsltty via the Github-releases provided installer (only through third parties)
2. Download the installer for latest (at time of writing 0.7.7).
3. Run installer.
4. Start MinTTY with via %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\bin\mintty.exe \bin\mintty.exe
5. Go to options menu.
6. Change somthing.
7. Click Save

When I do that, saving fails, bebecause MinTTY tries to save settings in a file in a wsltty-subfolder which doesn't exist. For me this subfodler is %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\josteink.

[mintty]

4. Start MinTTY with via %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\bin\mintty.exe \bin\mintty.exe

If you do that directly (command-line / Explorer), the now deprecated directory would indeed by addressed for configuration. The intended way to start wsltty is either via a Shorcut (desktop or Start menu shortcut) or with one of the wsl*.bat scripts generated into %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty from a Windows command-line. In these cases, the --configdir option is added to point you to the intended configuration directory which should also have been created (%APPDATA%\wsltty, note no LOCAL here).

[josteink]

OK. Gotcha. That makes sense. Thanks.

[PhilipDaniels]

I've just retested and it is working for me. The two installations are now indepdenent (config file was created in %AppData%/Roaming/wsltty/config.

Nice work!

[mintty]

Actually, I forgot to set the --configdir in the context menu entries that can optionally be installed ("add to context menu").