After trying out Cygwin for a while at work I have decided that I will keep using it on any Windows machines that I need to program on. That being said I found Emacs’s performance is very lacking so I’m not 100% sure on which method I’ll use to run Emacs in Windows.

Might be trying to move to a linux VM for most of my development at work. More to come in future blog posts about what has gone wrong with my setups during the past few weeks. For now I decided to figure out how hard it would be to get a new setup up and running at home. It was pretty easy so I will be trying this tomorrow at work. I’m using VirtualBox (since it’s quick and easy) and have choosen Arch linux since I want this machine to be small and lightening fast.

Originally I had found this page describing how to install Tmux in cygwin and I was able to accomplish this goal with relative ease. Once I realized that the instructions were dead simple, and that ncurses and libevent appears to already be included in cygwin I wanted to give it another go where I only installed tmux itself from source.

This weekend I tried to change over my computer from using msys (git and bash) as my main environment to trying out cygwin. So far so good. I’m also planning on setting up emacs as my main editor. I have not yet decided whether I’m going to use a native build of emacs, a cygwin build that uses the w32 native widgets, or a full cygwin/X environment.

After much though I’m going to try out Cygwin again. Tomorrow my system at work gets upgraded which means I have a brand new system to setup. I will try cygwin first prior to msys and see how far I get.

Today I made a quick bash script to automate a lot of what I talked about yesterday. You can always find the most recent version of this file in my configs repo but the first draft is also saved to a gist for this blog post.

This first post will be about everything I had to install to get Vim working in windows. If you try this out and run into any issues please let me know so I can fix things. I never know what I’ve installed years ago that ends up helping something out. It should also go without saying that in linux I use the default package manager for all of this. On a mac I use homebrew. Both are much simpler since a sane terminal is already installed.