I recommend VirtualBox+Ubuntu. Cygwin just doesn t cut it for certain tasks and is in beta for Win7.

Here is what I do for Python development on Windows:

• EasyEclipse for Python (includes eclipse, subclipse, pydev)
• GNU Win32 Native Windows ports for GNU tools
• Vim and Emacs (for non-IDE editing work)

I would see if MSysGit can provide what you want first. also since man pages aren t really anything hugely impressive... it might just be possible to just copy them. I ve had problems with cygwin, although to be honest I m not happy with MSys, MSysGit, or Cygwin. I wish someone would build one that was more... linux like. I would if I had to use windows every day, fortunately I only have to use windows sparingly.

IMO I d say VirtualBox + Gentoo Linux + KDevelop4, Gentoo will give you the control you need over your environment. I m doing exactly the opposite of you, I have gcc/qt4 installed on wine to compile for windows and using Linux primarily.

If you want to do development of POSIX applications (mostly command line), with all the familiar Linux tools, then cygwin is your best bet. It probably include everything you are used to.

But if you will try to do Windows development (anything with UI, drivers, services), then Visual Studio is really gold.

And in general Visual Studio is just great for anything, if you want to spend the time and money. Good IDE, great debugger. I highly recommend it. And if you are in Rome, do what the Romans do :-)

I would recommend Bloodshed DevC++ as a good basic non-microsoft specific Windows solution for developing ANSI C/C++ code. Personally I just use Visual Studio 2008 and ignore all the Microsoft specific extensions.

For Python there is the wonderful Komodo Edit software that is free, personally the IDE version is what I prefer, but I use an old 3.5.3 version that works for me. And they have a very popular Python package called ActivePython as well, that has a bunch of Windows specific extension modules.

Personally cygwin just feels and acts like a hack to me and is painful to setup and maintain. I think running Linux/Unix in a Virtual Machine is much less hassle if you are looking for a *nix environment. Getting a really genuine *nix environment feel is going to be very hard under Windows.

The following suggestions hold if you are not going to do complex template programming as the c++ IDE s other than visual studio SUCK, they cannot efficiently index modern C++ code (the boost library).

I would suggest using Netbeans (it has far better support for C++ than eclipse/CDT) with the following two build environments. Both are important if you want to cross-compile and test against POSIX and win32. This is not a silver-bullet, you should test on different variants of UNIX once in a while:

I would suggest installing Mingw and Msys for windows development, its nice when you can use awk, grep, sed etc on your code :D generative programming is easier with shell tools as well -- writing generative build scripts is a bitch to do effectively of the command line in windows (powershell might have changed this).

I would ALSO suggest installing Cygwin and using that on the side. Mingw is for programming against the win32 low-level API, Cygwin is for programming against the POSIX standard. Cygwin also compiles a lot of software that you would otherwise have to port.

Also once you get your project up and running you can use CMAKE as build environment, its the best thing since sliced bread :P You can get it to spit out build definition for anything and everything -- including visual studio.