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

Just like @justinhj, I use the native version of emacs on windows in conjunction with the (also native) ports of gnu utils (e.g. binutils for 'strings', etc.).

And I always use cygwin as the shell, within Emacs or independently of Emacs. That way, I retain the look & feel of my work environment when I switch back & forth from Windows to/from Linux/AIX/Solaris.

Unfortunately however, when I upgraded my Emacs from 21.2 to 23.2, Emacs lost its ability to recognize '/cygwin/c' by default. I have to research this now to see why it isn't working anymore and what I can do to fix that. I just found the following information and I'll check it out to see whether this is helpful. It seems odd that now that I need an external package for something that used to be always there by default:

• Re: /cygdrive/c vs c:
• cygwin-mount.el

I prefer, however, to minimize the use of additional packages. So, I just checked further the behavior of my "new" Emacs + Cygwin and it seems that I can access the C: drive by simply typing '/'.

That is cool - only one character (slash) instead of /cygdrive/c. However, the shell within Emacs prompts with '/cygdrive/c', a somewhat confusing difference.