Re: Who's using "CYGWIN=tty" and why?

[Andy Koppe <andy.koppe@gmail.com>]

On 10 May 2011 15:08, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Samuel,
>
> On May  9 22:23, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>> Christopher Faylor, le Mon 09 May 2011 16:05:24 -0400, a écrit :
>> > Has anyone tried running brltty without setting CYGWIN=tty?
>>
>> I never set the CYGWIN variable nowadays, actually, and brltty works
>> fine in that case.
>
> do you happen to know why brltty doesn't work with mintty?  Is there
> a chance to make this work?

On 9 May 2011 18:40, Lee Maschmeyer wrote:
> BRLTTY is a screen reading system that enables the use of refreshable
> braille devices (see below). It works on Linux and other unixes both in
> console mode and as an adjunct to the Unix GUI screen reader (Orca). It also
> works at the DOS command prompt, and gloriously beautifully in Cygwin. I
> tried mintty once and brltty would not read that window. Whether this can be
> changed by the developers I don't know. I've sporadically tried things like
> rxvt and when they didn't work right off the bat I didn't bother anymore
> since brltty is really splendid.

I've had a quick look at the brltty source and documentation, in
particular the chapter on supported screen drivers at [1]. Brltty
requires access to the full screen buffer of a console or terminal.

The Cygwin and native Windows versions of brltty default to using the
Windows console API to access the screen buffer of console windows.
Mintty, rxvt, and others of course aren't based on Windows consoles,
so that method won't work there. And since there's no documented or
otherwise obvious way for third party programs to implement the
Windows console API, this is a dead end.

However, brltty also has a driver for cooperating with GNU Screen,
which can be enabled with the option '-x sn' . This requires a patch
to Screen though that makes its screen buffers available to brltty via
shared memory. With that, it ought to be possible to make brltty work
with any terminal emulator, plus you'd get the added features of
Screen.

Andy

[1] http://mielke.cc/brltty/doc/Manual-BRLTTY/English/BRLTTY-11.html

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