Re: Best way to run on Windows XP

[Ehud Karni]

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 17:51:40 +0100, Jason Rumney wrote:
>
> Chris Lott writes:
>
> > Is the "best" way to run emacs on Windows XP to use the Native XP build
> > or the Cygwin? By "best" I mean: stable, able to run elisp code from
> > emacs.sources, and able to effectively use external tools like grep,
> > diff, etc... ?
>
> If you are only using Cygwin tools, then Cygwin might be better in
> some respects, but if that is the case, why use Windows at all?
>
> For any other case, I'd have to say the native build for the following
> reasons.
>
> Cygwin Emacs does not appear to be regularly maintained. Maybe the
> original port was good enough that it doesn't need anyone maintaining
> it, but I doubt it.

Cygwin Emacs is VERY well maintained by Joe Buehler. He did a superb
job, including the unexec part. His changes are included in the main
trunk, so compiling Emacs from CVS in Cygwin works OOTB.

I was working with NTEmacs and switched to the Cygwin Emacs because
of two reasons:
  1. You have the full UNIX toolset with real POSIX support
     (e.g. same paths, env vars with lower case letters).
  2. Some things that were included in UNIX Emacs (jpeg IIRC) were not
     supported by the NTEmacs but worked with Cygwin Emacs on X.

If you use the Cygwin toolset, I highly recommend using Cygwin Emacs.

Ehud.


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