Thanks Fabrice! I will continue to evaluate the WSL as I now have it installed and it seems to work. I think my strategy will be to try both the native windows version and the Ubuntu version of my key applications and just see which one works best for me. I installed XMing for X server and it seems to work well. BR / Johan On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 10:00 AM, Fabrice Popineau < fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr> wrote: > > > 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 >