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.