CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsterminalmsys2
Fabio Di Matteo
Fabio Di Matteo

Reputation: 45

msys2 no black window

My screenshot

How can I create a launcher for a program (or a script) on MSYS2 that does not show me the black window of the terminal?

My link:

msys2_shell.cmd -mingw64 -c  /c/myfolder/program.exe

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1661

Answers (1)

David Grayson
David Grayson

Reputation: 87486

To run a program in the MSYS2 environment without showing a window, you should right-click on your Desktop or somewhere else in Windows Explorer, select "New", select "Shortcut", and then enter something like this for the shortcut target:

C:\msys64\usr\bin\mintty.exe -w hide /bin/env MSYSTEM=MINGW64 /bin/bash -lc /c/path/to/your_program.exe

Note that there are 4 paths in here. The path to mintty and your_program.exe are absolute paths that you will need to adjust. The paths to env and bash are relative to your MSYS2 installation directory. Note also that the first path must be a standard Windows path, since Windows expects that when it is running a shortcut.

Explanation

It might seem odd to use MinTTY for this, but the first program we launch needs to be some program that was compiled for the Windows subsystem (-mwindows option to GCC), or else Windows will automatically start a new console when we run the program. We pass the -w hide option to MinTTY to tell it not to actually show its own window. Everything after that option is interpreted by MinTTY as a command to run.

So MinTTY will run /bin/env from the MSYS2 distribution and pass the remainder of the arguments on to it. This is a handy utility that is actually a standard part of Linux as well as MSYS2. It sets the MSYSTEM environment variable to MINGW64 (which is important later) and then it runs /bin/bash with the remainder of the command-line arguments. The MSYSTEM variable selects which of the three MSYS2 environments to use, and the value values for it are MSYS2, MINGW32, or MINGW64.

We pass -l to Bash so that it acts as a login script, and runs certain startup scripts. In particular, the /etc/profile script from MSYS2 is essential because it looks at the MSYSTEM environment variable, sees that it is MINGW64, and then sets a bunch of other environment variables (e.g. PATH) to give you the MinGW 64-bit shell environment, or some different environment if you changed MSYSTEM.

Finally, we pass the name of your program as the main argument to bash, so it will run that program after running the initialization scripts.

Upvotes: 4

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