Good alternatives to Cygwin? - Cygwin doesn't support natively support Win32 apps
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.
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.
There may be fewer "supported" packages, in that you have to install things by hand, but there won't be:
- Path issues (
cygpathis 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.