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Comment by pervycreeper | Hacker News Reader

Are there any use cases for Cygwin these days on a modern system where VMs are so easy to set up?

You don't have to transfer files between Cygwin and Windows. Keeping Cygwin up to date is a lot easier than maintaining a whole Linux distro. And you don't have to wait for it to boot up.

VMs can share host volumes, Cygwin can suddenly become buggy and has no release (it is currently doing shit with ACL on my install, to the point of being unusable, and this seems to have affected other people too), so is not completely suitable for team work, SSD are fast and modern Linux distro really fast to boot, and there is basically nothing to do to maintain a modern mainstream Linux distro (although you have to avoid distro like Mint too much oriented in GUI/UX and not enough in core system engineering and stability, but they would not give you anything critical in a VM anyway, because I your graphical stuff should be done mainly in your host)

You might want Cygwin for some reasons, but for me that would not be those you gave compared to a VM (disclaimer, I use both, at least when Cygwin is working...)

The use cases are certainly narrowing, but cygwin is still occasionally useful, e.g.:

- You want an actually functional ssh server running on windows so you can integrate with a mostly-linux test automation environment.

- You're committed to a (terrible) windows-only VCS, but develop some linux applications.

Sure -- I might be constrained to work on Windows development or use Windows tools, and having access to good UNIX/Linux-like command-line utilities for scripting, etc., in that environment is a big win.

Do you actually do that?

There's a lot of hoops one would have to get around for a seamless experience with a VM. Most of the time Cygwin just works[0]. I tried running my Emacs and terminal in a separate VM, wasn't so pleasant. Sharing the file system bidirectionally is the biggest problem.

[0] I'm sure for certain domains, say unix'y systems programming it's not true at all.

When I last tried installing cygwin it was horrific. The ui was awful, and involved manually clicking loads of boxes via a clunky ui. Next to impossible to reproduce. Has this improved? Can you just double click on InstallCygwin.exe now?

What's your use case? My intuition is telling me you want it to be something it's not :PP

I use it exclusively for CLI stuff via Mintty (the default terminal emulator). The installation just extracts the basic files and lets you download packages. Yes, setup.exe as a package manager is clunky. There's a third party thing called "cyg-apt" it's not that great but works. Personally I just went ahead and downloaded all available packages (just excluded a bunch that were a few GB large).

My 100 most used command: https://gist.github.com/auganov/1242885dbd452db05a47

It was a shitty development system for a POS system. Yes, it was too large to want to download everything but no programmatic way to tell it what you wanted (you'd think that someone that aped how a proper os worked would understand the need for complete command line control of installation, wouldn't you) and yes, it's been 3 years now but I remember the package manager looking like something someone knocked up in 3 minutes and meant to get around to fixing but never quite managed it. I think if you uninstalled and reinstalled it it even remember some of the previous values, making it very hard to retrace your steps with a view to scripting (on paper) what needed to be clicked on, so nobody else had quite the same subset of packages as me.

In any case where one has to mitigate the problems of bringing windows into the mix. At my last job I had several bridges to windows only systems and silliness that exposed out to a nix universe with ssh invokable cli tools.

Currently my only use case is that it does count in my book as a different variety of nix. If you are attempting to have a portable software it is another platform you can use to for testing that can be brought into a CI pipeline.

A more common use case (though still strange) is people using windows natively, who want to use C, C++, Fortran, Ada, etc to make windows programs (instead of cross compiling from Linux). Generally this category is students, and this is still far more educationally beneficial than attempting to learn skills with long term value from say visual studio's IDE.

edit note: asterisks make things italics on hn

Yes; when you want to operate on your Windows OS filesystem using Cygwin tools; when you want to use Cygwin tools freely in shell pipes with native tools; when you want to run something like Emacs locally with modes that use background executables for semantic / syntax / linting support; when you want to use shell job control with Windows executables; etc.

In no particular order, using vim, openssh, git, perl, bash, grep, tar, etc etc etc on the entire native file system in a POSIX environment is really fantastic. I also have an ubuntu VM to spin up on hand but I find I rarely need to do so. The cygwin mintty console is also far superior to the windows command console.

Yes, when you are forced to work on windows and you need sane CLI tools and a decent shell.

It's nice having a nearly native Unixlike shell and its more convenient than a VM. Even for simple tools like git and ssh. I use babun and it works great.

I prefer using cygwin and opens to ash into vms rather than putty

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