11 Other useful ports

11.1 Cygwin

http://www.cygwin.com/.

Cygwin is a popular complete POSIX emulation environment for Windows. Most of its tools can be used with Emacs, and it covers a wide range of ported software. The main shell used by Cygwin is GNU bash, but other shells are also available. Some Cygwin tools may not interoperate well with Emacs or other native Windows tools, due to the total immersion aspect of Cygwin, including its non-native filesystem mapping.

If you choose to use Cygwin, then its tools will probably be all that you need, but you will need to get image libraries from elsewhere, as the Cygwin ones are not compatible with non-Cygwin software. In fact, if Cygwin is on your PATH when you run Emacs, and Emacs does not find other versions of the image libraries first, then the Cygwin ones can cause problems. Cygwin developers recommend that you do not put Cygwin on your system PATH for this reason. Instead you can make the Cygwin tools available within Emacs by setting exec-path in your init file.

11.2 MinGW and MSYS

http://www.mingw.org/

MinGW is a set of development tools that produce native Windows executables, not dependent on Cygwin's POSIX emulation DLLs.

MSYS is a POSIX shell and minimal set of tools that are commonly used in configure scripts. Like Cygwin, this environment uses a non-native filesystem mapping to appear more POSIX like to the scripts that it runs. This is intended to complement the MinGW tools to make it easier to port software to Windows.

11.3 UWIN

http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/

UWIN is another POSIX emulation environment, like Cygwin and MSYS, that provides a large number of ported tools. The shell used by UWIN is ksh, the Korn shell.

11.4 GnuWin32

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

GnuWin32 provides precompiled native Windows ports of a wide selection of Free software and libraries. Tools available here that are useful for Emacs include:

• Arc - used by archive-mode to edit .arc files.
• Bzip2 - used by Emacs to automatically decompress .bz2 files.
• CompFace - used by gnus to display XFace headers in messages.
• CoreUtils - GNU file, shell and text utilities (also in MSYS)
• DiffUtils - for ediff and producing patches
• FindUtils - for grep-find and other file searches.
• GifLib - library to support GIF images.
• Grep - for searching through files with grep.
• Gzip - used by Emacs to automatically decompress .gz files.
• Jpeg - library to support JPEG images (also in GTK).
• Lha - used by archive-mode to edit .lzh files.
• LibPng - library to support PNG images (also in GTK).
• LibTiff - library to support TIFF images (also in GTK).
• Make - used by compile for building projects (also in MinGW)
• OpenSSL - used by gnus to talk to servers over SSL.
• Patch - used by ediff-patch-file and others to apply patches.
• Tar - used by tar-mode to edit tar files.
• TexInfo - used to build Emacs' manuals.
• Unzip - used by archive-mode for extracting zip files.
• Xpm - library to support XPM images (bundled with Emacs binaries)
• Zip - used by archive-mode for editing zip files.
• Zlib - required by LibPng (also in GTK).

11.5 GTK

GTK is a potential source for some of the image libraries that Emacs requires. GTK is installed along with other ports of GUI software, such as the GIMP image editor, and Pidgin instant messenger client. If GTK is installed when you run addpm, Emacs will use the image libraries that it provides, even if they are not on the PATH. GTK ships with JPEG, PNG and TIFF support.

11.6 How do I read man pages?

Man pages for Emacs and other ported programs that you have can be read using Emacs' built-in manual reader woman. This requires no external programs, but if you do have a port of man, there is also an Emacs wrapper man that which may be slightly faster.