Proper handling (i.e., displaying, copying, pasting) strings that contain Unicode characters beyond BMP stopped working a few weeks ago. I was heavily using this capability of mintty as recently as a few weeks ago and when it stopped working I noticed that almost immediately. I was quietly waiting for the last three weeks or so for the issue to be fixed. Since the issue has not been fixed yet, I am reporting it now, just in case it wasn’t noticed.

I tried downgrading mintty to each of the previous versions that Cygwin setup.exe is still offering to install — the same problem persisted. I concluded that the issue was caused either by a recent update of Cygwin or Windows.

Until the problem I am reporting here is fixed, I am forced to use another terminal application. What I am writing below may be helpful for anybody who has been affected by the issue I am reporting.

I tried Windows Terminal and Alacritty.

Windows Terminal a few years ago had serious issues with Unicode characters beyond BMP. As of late, when Windows Terminal became a default terminal application in Windows 11, all those issues were corrected and Windows Terminal now has practically all of the capabilities that mintty has had plus the very convenient automatic font fallback mechanism that mintty lacks.

Alacritty on Windows properly displays Unicode characters beyond BMP. Pasting strings containing such characters into Alacritty terminal, however, is broken (it pastes the trailing surrogate character instead of the whole surrogate pair representing the character). Alacritty on Windows uses the same, I believe, font fallback mechanism (DirectWrite) that Windows Terminal uses.

Until mintty is again capable of handling Unicode beyond BMP, I am forced to stop using it and will be using Windows Terminal that surprised me as working perfectly both with Cygwin bash and with Windows CMD shell.

Configuration.
Windows 11 Pro fully updated.
cygwin 3.7.0
mintty 3.7.7