How to best integrate Emacs and Cygwin?

Question

There are a ton of ways to integrate Cygwin with Emacs on Windows. EmacsWiki shows a few ideas. Here are the options that I\'ve found:

1. Use the Emacs that com

Answer 1

I installed cygwin on the root. It explicitly warns you against it, but I saw no ill effects. (I found that piece of advice from Steve Yegge).

I also installed cygwin-mount, which helps a bunch. Also, I had to switch from ispell to aspell. Finally, a little bit of .emacs tweaking, and I was good to go:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;CygForTheWin
;;*cygwin
(when (equal system-type 'windows-nt) 
(message "Setting up Cygwin...")
(let* ((cygwin-root "c:")
       (cygwin-bin (concat cygwin-root "/bin"))
       (gambit-bin "/usr/local/Gambit-C/4.0b22/bin/")
       (snow-bin "/usr/local/snow/current/bin")
       (mysql-bin "/wamp/bin/mysql/mysql5.0.51a/bin/"))
   (setenv "PATH" (concat cygwin-bin ";" ;
                          snow-bin ";" 
                          gambit-bin ";"
                          mysql-bin ";"
                          "c:/usr/local/jdk1.60_03/bin/"
                          ".;")  
           (getenv "PATH"))
   (setq exec-path (cons cygwin-bin exec-path)))

(require 'cygwin-mount)
(cygwin-mount-activate)

(setq shell-file-name "bash")
(setq explicit-shell-file-name "bash")

(defun jonnay-cygwin-shell ()
  "Wrapper around cygwin-shell so that it doesn't throw an error"
  (interactive)
  (condition-case e
   (cygwin-shell)
   (message "There was an error trying to launch the shell: %s" e)))

(message "Setting up Cygwin...Done")


;; found from the manual, check, use and make go?
 (defun my-shell-setup ()
   "For Cygwin bash under Emacs 20"
   (setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output 'this)
   (setq comint-completion-addsuffix t)
   (setq comint-eol-on-send t)
   (setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
   (make-variable-buffer-local 'comint-completion-addsuffix))

(setq shell-mode-hook 'my-shell-setup)
(add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook 'jonnay-cygwin-shell)
)