Re: "Best" way to run on Windows XP

[Jason Rumney]

"Chris  Lott" <Chris.Lott@gmail.com> 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.

A lot of effort has been put into making native Windows Emacs work
with Cygwin tools. The cygwin developers don't seem to show any
interest in making their tools work with native Windows tools. Even
for such programs as make where running external tools is the
program's primary purpose, their solution is to ask everyone to
rewrite their makefiles with awkward macros around filename arguments
that might be processed by non-Cygwin tools.