Re: Emacs on Windows XP -> Cygwin

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:14:01 -0800
> 
> > I wouldn't recommend doing what you do, unless the OP likes to
> > "tinker" with all kinds of Emacs options and optional packages, such
> > as cygwin-mount.  There are subtle incompatibilities between Cygwin
> > and native Windows programs (file-name conventions, console and pipe
> > I/O, text vs. binary I/O, signal delivery, etc.), so someone who's
> > used for things "to just work", like they do on GNU/Linux, is well
> > advised to limit him/herself to either only Cygwin programs or only
> > native Windows programs.
> 
> Eli is an expert wrt Emacs and Windows. And Lennart's EmacsW32
> (http://www.ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html) is a very nice turnkey
> installer.
> 
> I'm not an expert on this, and I don't mean to contradict the experts,

I now realize that my opinion was worded too categorically: I failed
to qualify it by saying that the amount and probability of subtle
problems of the kind I mentioned depends on what one does with Emacs.
On the extreme, if all one does is edit files, then, of course, no
compatibility problems will ever be seen.

In general, I'd expect the amount of potential problems to go up with
usage of compilers, spell-checkers, mail agents, debuggers,
shell-mode, and other features where subprocesses interact with Emacs.