title: How to best integrate Emacs and Cygwin?
body: <p>There are a ton of ways to integrate Cygwin with Emacs on Windows.  <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CygWin" rel="noreferrer">EmacsWiki</a> shows a few ideas.  Here are the options that I've found:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Use the Emacs that comes with Cygwin.  (Then find a way to get to cmd.exe if you want it.)</li>
  <li>Use NTEmacs and Cygwin as a "sometimes" shell.  (A special command to launch Cygwin)</li>
  <li>Use NTEmacs and Cygwin as the "always" shell.  (M-x shell launches cygwin)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>To give some clarity as to "why".  Here are a couple of examples where I wish I had Cygwin with Emacs:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>M-x whois doesn't work on NTEmacs.</li>
  <li>Packages like <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WanderLust" rel="noreferrer">Wanderlust</a> include a Makefile that isn't Windows friendly.</li>
  <li>Sometimes I just need a bash shell for something.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So which option of Emacs/Cygwin works well for others?  Also, has anyone tried MSYS integration successfully?</p>