MinTTY is a Windows-specific terminal emulator for the
widely used Cygwin and MSYS projects, which provide
Unix-like environments for Windows. MinTTY consoles behave
differently from native Windows consoles (such as
cmd.exe or PowerShell) in many ways, and in some cases,
these differences make it necessary to treat MinTTY
consoles differently in code.
The mintty library provides a simple way to detect if
your code in running in a MinTTY console on Windows. It
exports isMinTTY, which does the right thing 90% of the
time (by checking if standard error is attached to
MinTTY), and it also exports isMinTTYHandle for the
other 10% of the time (when you want to check is some
arbitrary handle is attached to MinTTY). As you might
expect, both of these functions will simply return False
on any non-Windows operating system.