Yeah, I found some of that a little while back which definitely help a lot (before I switched to Linux as my primary OS…unrelated reasons), and the aspell thing is actually designed as a replacement for ispell on all platforms (Linux’s will quite often just symlink them).

The HOME trick is useful for working with the shell buffer as well, which doesn’t like spaces in the path (although cygwin itself doesn’t seem to care!?).

Either way, thanks for the input, hopefully it will help anyone reading this in the future.

– Lorenz

* Spell checking: I don’t think Cygwin has ispell, but it does have aspell which is supposedly a dropin replacement. Run Cygwin setup and make sure you’ve got aspell installed, then put this in your .emacs file:

;; substitute aspell for ispell
(setq-default ispell-program-name “c:/cygwin/bin/aspell.exe”)

* Put Cygwin apps into the Emacs search path: Put the following in your .emacs:

(when (file-exists-p “c:/cygwin/bin”)
;; Add cygwin directories to the emacs search path
(setq exec-path (cons “C:/cygwin/bin” exec-path))
(setq exec-path (cons “c:/cygwin/usr/local/bin” exec-path))
(setenv “PATH” (concat “c:\\cygwin\\bin;” (getenv “PATH”)))
(setenv “PATH” (concat “c:\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin;” (getenv “PATH”)))

Also, I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that you can set the HOME environment variable in Windows to change where Emacs looks for your .emacs file right? I’ve got mine set to look in c:\cygwin\home\bob. (obviously you’ll need to customize based on your cygwin username! )

There are some more Cygwin/Emacs customization advice on the Emacs Wiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CygWin