This project is a parallel fork of node-pty providing prebuilt packages for certain Node.js and Electron versions.

Inspired by daviwil/node-pty-prebuilt.

Usage

Thanks to the excellent prebuild, prebuild-install modules, and prebuildify using this module is extremely easy. You merely have to change your node-pty dependency to @homebridge/node-pty-prebuilt-multiarch and then change any require statements in your code from require('node-pty') to require('@homebridge/node-pty-prebuilt-multiarch').

How It Works

We maintain a parallel fork of the node-pty codebase that will be updated as new releases are shipped. When we merge new updates to the code into the prebuilt-multiarch branch, new prebuilt packages for our supported Node.js and Electron versions are updated to the corresponding GitHub release.

When @homebridge/node-pty-prebuilt-multiarch is installed as a package dependency, the installation script checks to see if there's a prebuilt package on this repo for the OS, ABI version, and architecture of the current process and then downloads it, extracting it into the module path. If a corresponding prebuilt package is not found, node-gyp is invoked to build the package for the current platform.

Prebuilt Versions

We only provide prebuilt binaries for Node.js 17 and Electron 17.0.0 or higher. Pls note that prebuilds for Electron 28 are not supplied due to build issues.

Build / Package

Please note releasing this package uses the GitHub action Stage 1 - Run prebuild's and Create GitHub and NPM release and Stage 2 - Validate NPM Package contents.

The github action takes the branch selected from the workflow start drop down, and creates a GitHub and NPM Release containing the prebuild artifacts. The version of the Release comes from the package.json, and in the case of a BETA release automatically appends the beta release version. During processing, it leverages a branch called release-candidate as a holding area for prebuilds.

When running the job, most times a couple of the instances of the sub step Commit & Push Changes within Prebuild NPM and GitHub Release artifacts fails. When this occurs just re-run. This is due to concurrency issues between the steps and GitHub. A typical run has 3-4 steps fail.

1. Create branch release-candidate if not existing (the script deletes it before starting and will fail if it isn't present)
2. Ensure version tag within package.json reflects version you want to publish, please note beta tags are added by the action.
3. Run Action Run prebuild's and Create GitHub and NPM release, and select branch you wish to publish, and if it needs to be BETA tagged and versioned
4. This will run for about an hour, and create a GitHub release with the prebuild artifacts attached, and a npm release with the prebuild artifacts attached

License

• Copyright (c) 2012-2015, Christopher Jeffrey (MIT License).
• Copyright (c) 2016, Daniel Imms (MIT License).
• Copyright (c) 2018, Microsoft Corporation (MIT License).
• Copyright (c) 2018, David Wilson (MIT License).
• Copyright (c) 2018, oznu (MIT License).
• Copyright (c) 2025, Homebridge (MIT License).

Next Version

Input handling changes:

• Improve Ctrl-C handling with programs that use unprocessed input. (e.g. Ctrl-C now cancels input with PowerShell on Windows 10.) #116
• Fix a theoretical issue with input event ordering. #117
• Ctrl/Shift+{Arrow,Home,End} keys now work with IntelliJ. #118

Version 0.4.3 (2017-05-17)

Input handling changes:

• winpty sets ENHANCED_KEY for arrow and navigation keys. This fixes an issue with the Ruby REPL. #99
• AltGr keys are handled better now. #109
• In ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_INPUT mode, when typing Home/End with a modifier (e.g. Ctrl), winpty now generates an H/F escape sequence like ^[[1;5F rather than a 1/4 escape like ^[[4;5~. #114

Resizing and scraping fixes:

• winpty now synthesizes a WINDOW_BUFFER_SIZE_EVENT event after resizing the console to better propagate window size changes to console programs. In particular, this affects WSL and Cygwin. #110
• Better handling of resizing for certain full-screen programs, like WSL less. #112
• Hide the cursor if it's currently outside the console window. This change fixes an issue with Far Manager. #113
• winpty now avoids using console fonts smaller than 5px high to improve half-vs-full-width character handling. See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/19665. b4db322010

Cygwin/MSYS adapter fix:

• The way the winpty Cygwin/MSYS2 adapter searches for the program to launch changed. It now resolves symlinks and searches the PATH explicitly. #81 #98

This release does not include binaries for the old MSYS1 project anymore. MSYS2 will continue to be supported. See https://github.com/rprichard/winpty/issues/97.

Version 0.4.2 (2017-01-18)

This release improves WSL support (i.e. Bash-on-Windows):

• winpty generates more correct input escape sequences for WSL programs that enable an alternate input mode using DECCKM. This bug affected arrow keys and Home/End in WSL programs such as vim, mc, and less. #90
• winpty now recognizes the COMMON_LVB_REVERSE_VIDEO and COMMON_LVB_UNDERSCORE text attributes. The Windows console uses these attributes to implement the SGR.4(Underline) and SGR.7(Negative) modes in its VT handling. This change affects WSL pager status bars, man pages, etc.

The build system no longer has a "version suffix" mechanism, so passing VERSION_SUFFIX=<suffix> to make or -D VERSION_SUFFIX=<suffix> to gyp now has no effect. AFAIK, the mechanism was never used publicly. 67a34b6c03

Version 0.4.1 (2017-01-03)

Bug fixes:

• This version fixes a bug where the winpty-agent.exe process could read past the end of a buffer. #94

Version 0.4.0 (2016-06-28)

The winpty library has a new API that should be easier for embedding. 880c00c69e

User-visible changes:

• winpty now automatically puts the terminal into mouse mode when it detects that the console has left QuickEdit mode. The --mouse option still forces the terminal into mouse mode. In principle, an option could be added to suppress terminal mode, but hopefully it won't be necessary. There is a script in the misc subdirectory, misc/ConinMode.ps1, that can change the QuickEdit mode from the command-line.
• winpty now passes keyboard escapes to bash.exe in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. #82

Bug fixes:

• By default, winpty.dll avoids calling SetProcessWindowStation within the calling process. #58
• Fixed an uninitialized memory bug that could have crashed winpty. #80
• winpty now works better with very large and very small terminal windows. It resizes the console font according to the number of columns. #61
• winpty no longer uses Mark to freeze the console on Windows 10. The Mark command could interfere with the cursor position, corrupting the data in the screen buffer. #79

Version 0.3.0 (2016-05-20)

User-visible changes:

• The UNIX adapter is renamed from console.exe to winpty.exe to be consistent with MSYS2. The name winpty.exe is less likely to conflict with another program and is easier to search for online (e.g. for someone unfamiliar with winpty).
• The UNIX adapter now clears the TERM variable. #43
• An escape character appearing in a console screen buffer cell is converted to a '?'. #47

Bug fixes:

• A major bug affecting XP users was fixed. #67
• Fixed an incompatibility with ConEmu where winpty hung if ConEmu's "Process 'start'" feature was enabled. #70
• Fixed a bug where cmd.exe sometimes printed the message, Not enough storage is available to process this command.. #74

Many changes internally:

• The codebase is switched from C++03 to C++11 and uses exceptions internally. No exceptions are thrown across the C APIs defined in winpty.h.
• This version drops support for the original MinGW compiler packaged with Cygwin (i686-pc-mingw32-g++). The MinGW-w64 compiler is still supported, as is the MinGW distributed at mingw.org. Compiling with MSVC now requires MSVC 2013 or newer. Windows XP is still supported. ec3eae8df5
• Pipe security is improved. winpty works harder to produce unique pipe names and includes a random component in the name. winpty secures pipes with a DACL that prevents arbitrary users from connecting to its pipes. winpty now passes PIPE_REJECT_REMOTE_CLIENTS on Vista and up, and it verifies that the pipe client PID is correct, again on Vista and up. When connecting to a named pipe, winpty uses the SECURITY_IDENTIFICATION flag to restrict impersonation. Previous versions should still be secure.
• winpty-debugserver.exe now has an --everyone flag that allows capturing debug output from other users.
• The code now compiles cleanly with MSVC's "Security Development Lifecycle" (/SDL) checks enabled.

Version 0.2.2 (2016-02-25)

Minor bug fixes and enhancements:

• Fix a bug that generated spurious mouse input records when an incomplete mouse escape sequence was seen.
• Fix a buffer overflow bug in winpty-debugserver.exe affecting messages of exactly 4096 bytes.
• For MSVC builds, add a src/configurations.gypi file that can be included on the gyp command-line to enable 32-bit and 64-bit builds.
• winpty-agent --show-input mode: Flush stdout after each line.
• Makefile builds: generate a build/winpty.lib import library to accompany build/winpty.dll.

Version 0.2.1 (2015-12-19)

• The main project source was moved into a src directory for better code organization and to fix #51.
• winpty recognizes many more escape sequences, including:
  • putty/rxvt's F1-F4 keys #40
  • the Linux virtual console's F1-F5 keys
  • the "application numpad" keys (e.g. enabled with DECPAM)
• Fixed handling of Shift-Alt-O and Alt-[.
• Added support for mouse input. The UNIX adapter has a --mouse argument that puts the terminal into mouse mode, but the agent recognizes mouse input even without the argument. The agent recognizes double-clicks using Windows' double-click interval setting (i.e. GetDoubleClickTime). #57

Changes to debugging interfaces:

• The WINPTY_DEBUG variable is now a comma-separated list. The old behavior (i.e. tracing) is enabled with WINPTY_DEBUG=trace.
• The UNIX adapter program now has a --showkey argument that dumps input bytes.
• The winpty-agent.exe program has a --show-input argument that dumps INPUT_RECORD records. (It omits mouse events unless --with-mouse is also specified.) The agent also responds to WINPTY_DEBUG=trace,input, which logs input bytes and synthesized console events, and it responds to WINPTY_DEBUG=trace,dump_input_map, which dumps the internal table of escape sequences.

Version 0.2.0 (2015-11-13)

No changes to the API, but many small changes to the implementation. The big changes include:

• Support for 64-bit Cygwin and MSYS2
• Support for Windows 10
• Better Unicode support (especially East Asian languages)

Details:

• The configure script recognizes 64-bit Cygwin and MSYS2 environments and selects the appropriate compiler.
• winpty works much better with the upgraded console in Windows 10. The conhost.exe hang can still occur, but only with certain programs, and is much less likely to occur. With the new console, use Mark instead of SelectAll, for better performance. #31 #30 #53
• The UNIX adapter now calls setlocale(LC_ALL, "") to set the locale.
• Improved Unicode support. When a console is started with an East Asian code page, winpty now chooses an East Asian font rather than Consolas / Lucida Console. Selecting the right font helps synchronize character widths between the console and terminal. (It's not perfect, though.) #41
• winpty now more-or-less works with programs that change the screen buffer or resize the original screen buffer. If the screen buffer height changes, winpty switches to a "direct mode", where it makes no effort to track scrolling. In direct mode, it merely syncs snapshots of the console to the terminal. Caveats:
  • Changing the screen buffer (i.e. SetConsoleActiveScreenBuffer) breaks winpty on Windows 7. This problem can eventually be mitigated, but never completely fixed, due to Windows 7 bugginess.
  • Resizing the original screen buffer can hang conhost.exe on Windows 10. Enabling the legacy console is a workaround.
  • If a program changes the screen buffer and then exits, relying on the OS to restore the original screen buffer, that restoration probably will not happen with winpty. winpty's behavior can probably be improved here.
• Improved color handling:
  • DkGray-on-Black text was previously hiddenly completely. Now it is output as DkGray, with a fallback to LtGray on terminals that don't recognize the intense colors. #39.
  • The console is always initialized to LtGray-on-Black, regardless of the user setting, which matches the console color heuristic, which translates LtGray-on-Black to "reset SGR parameters."
• Shift-Tab is recognized correctly now. #19
• Add a --version argument to winpty-agent.exe and the UNIX adapter. The argument reports the nominal version (i.e. the VERSION.txt) file, with a "VERSION_SUFFIX" appended (defaulted to -dev), and a git commit hash, if the git command successfully reports a hash during the build. The git command is invoked by either make or gyp.
• The agent now combines ReadConsoleOutputW calls when it polls the console buffer for changes, which may slightly reduce its CPU overhead. #44.
• A gyp file is added to help compile with MSVC.
• The code can now be compiled as C++11 code, though it isn't by default. bde8922e08
• If winpty can't create a new window station, it charges ahead rather than aborting. This situation might happen if winpty were started from an SSH session.
• Debugging improvements:
  • WINPTYDBG is renamed to WINPTY_DEBUG, and a new WINPTY_SHOW_CONSOLE variable keeps the underlying console visible.
  • A winpty-debugserver.exe program is built and shipped by default. It collects the trace output enabled with WINPTY_DEBUG.
• The Makefile build of winpty now compiles winpty-agent.exe and winpty.dll with -O2.

Version 0.1.1 (2012-07-28)

Minor bugfix release.

Version 0.1 (2012-04-17)

Initial release.