Besides, was MacOS nixy back in those days? I seem to recall it was a lot different then...

Overkill or underkill? It's not an emulation environment, but a software layer that MS recommended to replace their Unix Services for Windows environment when they phased it out.

By default, if you install the base cygwin env, you are going to get a tty interface.

The OP said: <quote> All I need is one window to paste the program and one to see the text-only output; no graphics, modules, or other bells & whistles. </quote> The windows perl installs don't do a great job of making unixy things work - they often end up using '\' as a path separate when the win32 and lower NT-OS layers both accepted '/'.

The main thing I didn't like working in the windows env was its crappy shell (command.com=>cmd.exe). It was designed on the mainframe idea of overloading switches and options onto a few commands vs. the unix idea of splitting things up so you can chain them together however you want. I mostly thought the OP would be unhappy with the windows CLI.

With a cygwin env, you can run other terminal emulators configured as you like, and emac or gvim in graphics mode rather than in a TTY mode that has poor font support.

But I *do* have my own issues w/Cygwin -- but I'm alot more particular than most and I was going by what the OP wrote in wanting simplicity.

I agree with stevieb about not going with Cygwin as the first recommendation on how to get Perl on Windows. Not only is it serious overkill, but the last time that I tried to uninstall Cygwin (about 10-12 years ago) it didn't go very well (i.e. reinstalling Windows was the only way to cleanly uninstall Cygwin).

If someone is wanting to use Perl on Windows without compiling it from source code, I'd recommend going with Strawberry Perl, ActiveState's ActivePerl (also linked to in BrowserUk's post), or Citrus Perl. If there is a strong need for other aspects of the Cygwin environmet, then and only then would I be ok with recommending Cygwin.

Cygwin, by default installs all in 1 directory -- you delete the directory and it is uninstalled.

However, if you choose a custom install, and put it in the root dir, it might be more complicated.

It doesn't tie into the windows sys dir, and didn't used to even touch the registry. The only thing it uses the registry for is to allow users to install multiple - separate copies (which most users don't need).

I've tried Strawberry perl, activestate's perl (very incompat w/standard perl env using cpan) -- can't say I've tried citrus though.

One thing that made me as pleased as punch, was when Cygwin went 64-bit. All of the cygwin-x64 environment is available in safemode ***AND*** in the recovery environment. But that's nothing to do with perl, so enough of that. ;-).

I just find the bash env more comfy to design from. I often start simple scripts in shell or perl in the shell, editing it on the command line, then moving to the visual editor (invoking vi or whatever), and then writing it to a file and moving on from there. Set the number option in Vim, and exec perl scripts in another win -- and see things side-by-side. Simple paradigm that works the same for me on Windows as on linux -- same tool chain. No special Graphics or IDE's to learn.. alot may depend on what tools he is used to, but cut/paste -- highlight text and it is "selected", and use a middle click to paste somewhere if all is under 'X' -- but if in windows, extra keyboard usage and cumbersome.

But I'm not on the latest cygwin -- I didn't have the time/energy to work around newer changes that my highly customized environment often ran up against. I have the same logins on my linux and windows server -- with the linux server hosting files and the user-authentication for my windows system via a samba based domain on the linux server. Now that would all be overkill, but the basics seem ... so basic.

Macs went *nix at 10 (aka OS X). System 8 was a specially compiled MacPerl just for Macs.