> Cygwin has a more complex setup and not great compatibility with windows executables, IIRC.

And that's how/why MSYS2 is a nice alternative to Cygwin, especially its environments that use UCRT instead of MSVCRT when considering "compatibility" from the perspective of building and shipping software that doesn't require the user to first install a special environment/runtime. UCRT ships by default on Windows 10.

Totally: if you want to redistribute stuff msys2 makes this much easier. I have both on my system.

As a shell environment I like cygwin. With posix compatibility I can compile nearly everything (that does not use libuv).

I do not get the narrative of complicated setup for this use case. Download installer and click next a few times: does not seem to be so difficult. The cygwin package installer IMHO is a bit easier to use than pacman.

One example issue is that cygwin tries much harder to enforce a «linux / chmod» view of file permissions, which it tries to map onto the underlying windows/ ntfs permissions. This can cause issues like creating files that won’t (easily) be deleted and other yak-shaving-inducing problems.

Cannot echo this at all. I use native binaries like pandoc or chocolatey from cygwin all the time. The only issue may be with stdout and file paths.

There is still msys, if you want more windows. I think git bash mostly is only a packaged msys distribution, isn't it??

> There is still msys

MSYS2 is the better option, and is not "MSYS version 2", it's an independent rewrite.

> git bash mostly is only a packaged msys distribution, isn't it?

It's in parts based on MSYS2, but doesn't give you a "full install" (or whatever is the best way to phrase it).

Sorry for being sloppy I meant msys2.