I switched from Cygwin to Msys2 a year or two ago and it's been very good.
The pacman-based package management is very good.  The only thing to watch
out for is that there are actually 2 gcc suites and if you want to build
automake projects (like many open source projects), you'll want to be using
the Mingw gcc and NOT the Msys gcc.  ConEmu is a great terminal program to
use in conjunction with Msys2

 I also recommend opinionated Emacs distros.  I used to use Prelude but
I've been using Spacemacs (in Emacs mode) for quite a while, now.  I like
Spacemacs because your loaded packages are explicitly in your .spacemacs
file and it's easy to reconstruct which packages you have loaded from that.


-- Bill

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 12:25 PM Fabrice Popineau <
fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr> wrote:

> 2016-08-23 10:24 GMT+02:00 Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>:
>
>> On Tuesday, 23 Aug 2016 at 01:34, Grant Rettke wrote:
>> > I found Cygwin to make things more difficult for Emacs so I installed
>> > the plain old Windows Emacs and did the following:
>> >
>> > https://github.com/grettke/help/blob/master/help.md#windows
>>
>> Thanks.  I'll check this out.
>>
>> If I ever have to use a Windows system at all, I want bash & emacs and
>> cygwin makes it very easy (for me).
>
>
> I always found Cygwin to be a PIA when working under  Windows.
> I vastly prefer to use msys2+mingw64. Emacs 25 compiles out of the box
> as a native w64 app and you get bash + all the tools you may want.
> My $0.02
>
> Fabrice
>
>