Good alternatives to Cygwin? - Cygwin doesn't support natively support Win32 apps

Solution 1:

The best alternative I found is Gow (Gnu On Windows).

It's a lightweight alternative to Cygwin, about 10 times lighter. As far as I know the 130 tools installed with Gow are regular Win32 applications.

Solution 2:

2016 Answer

I built Cash this year, a cross-platform implementation of Linux commands running on Node.js.

This supports both global installations of each command in your path, or an interactive shell with full support for bash-like syntax, command piping, autocompletion and history.

This additionally runs win32 apps within the shell.

Solution 3:

MSYS

There may be fewer "supported" packages, in that you have to install things by hand, but there won't be:

• Path issues (cygpath is a non-solution, as you can't always shove it in)
• Programs confused by cygwin packages reporting their OS as 'cygwin'
• .dll/.so/.lib/.a confusion

And there is much better interop with windows applications.