What are Cygwin and MinGW, and do I need them to run XEmacs?
To answer the second part of the question: No, you, you don’t need Cygwin or MinGW to build or to run XEmacs. But if you have them and want to use them, XEmacs supports these environments. (One important reason to support Cygwin is that it lets the MS Windows developers test out their code in a Unix environment without actually having to have a Unix machine around. For this reason alone, Cygwin support is likely to remain supported for a long time in XEmacs. Same goes for the X support under Cygwin, for the same reasons. MinGW support, on the other hand, depends on volunteers to keep it up to date; but this is generally not hard.) Cygwin is a set of tools providing Unix-like API on top of Win32. It makes it easy to port large Unix programs without significant changes to their source code. It is a development environment as well as a runtime environment. When built with Cygwin, XEmacs supports all display types — TTY, X & Win32 GUI, and can be built with support for all three simultane
