2017-08-03 0:12 GMT+02:00 Tim Cross : > Probably no real help, but win10 is (or soon will be) bundling in bash > shell, which may address many of the reasons to use Cygwin. From posts > I've seen on a number of lists, I would not be surprised to see cygwin > slowly decline into obscurity. I see little interest in the emacs devel > list for cygwin since the native windows version has matured (and it has > been suggested, is the largest emacs user base). > > I am a Windows user (very long time) and Cygwin has never been an option to me. Native Emacs works pretty well under Windows. There is only one drawback: it is slow (slower than linux) at running external processes and some emacs packages do that pretty heavily (ivy/counsel, flycheck). I have seen reports of slower startup times with the native Windows emacs than with Linux, however I have not been able to reproduce them (for example using helm default config or spacemacs config). Depending on wheter you use a 32 bits emacs or a 64 bits emacs, you may want to add 32 bits Gnu utilities (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/) or 64 bits Gnu utilities (http://www.msys2.org/, provides a much better environment than Cygwin in my opinion) Or you may want to try the new WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, as described by Tim) which provides a full Ubuntu distribution without the penalty for running external processes, and without the penalty of running a VM. WSL is pretty impressive and emacs works pretty well once you get a good X server (like MobaXTerm). Fabrice