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