Cygwin ships with a fairly small number of X applications, for example:

In addition to the low-level Xlib library for developing X applications, Cygwin also ships with various higher-level and cross-platform GUI frameworks, including Gtk + and Qt.

It has been ported to Microsoft Windows and distributed with Cygwin and MinGW, to DOS by the DJGPP project, to Novell NetWare and to Android via various terminal emulation applications.

Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment.

These are more compliant with Unix terminal standards and user interface conventions than the Cygwin console, but are less suited for running Windows console programs.

The version of gcc that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, specifying whether a program is a windowing or console mode program, adding resources, etc.

Red Hat normally licenses the Cygwin library under the GNU General Public License version 3 with an exception to allow linking to any free and open source software whose license conforms to the Open Source Definition.

Initially, Cygwin was called gnuwin32 ( not to be confused with the current GnuWin32 project ).

Originally developed on IRIX, Freeciv has been ported to many different operating systems: it is distributed with many Linux distributions, offers installers for Microsoft Windows, and has been known to run on Mac OS X, Solaris, Ultrix, QNX, OS / 2, Cygwin, AmigaOS, RISC OS, Maemo, ZETA, SkyOS and various BSDs.

The official implementation, the Melbourne Mercury Compiler, is available for most Unix platforms, including Mac OS X, as well as for Microsoft Windows ( in Windows, it requires one of the Cygwin or MinGW toolsets, and can be compiled either with GCC or Microsoft Visual C ++).

Microsoft Windows is not shipped with support for X, but many third-party implementations exist, as free and open source software such as Cygwin / X, Xming ( free up to 6. 9. 0. 31 ) and WeirdX ; freeware such as Mocha X Server ; and proprietary products such as Xmanager, Exceed, eXcursion ( Hewlett-Packard ), MKS X / Server, Reflection X, X-Win32 and Xming ( current versions ).

Cygwin also provides the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU make, and other software that provides a nearly complete Unix-like system within Windows ; MSYS also provides GNU make and other tools designed to work with the MinGW version of GCC.

One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor CRS Retail Systems for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP and dial-up on SCO OpenServer, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows ( with Cygwin ).

Accordingly, this approach requires Win32 programs written with Cygwin to run on top of a copylefted compatibility library that must be distributed with the program, along with the program's source code.

Unlike Cygwin, MinGW does not require a compatibility layer DLL and thus programs do not need to be distributed with source code.

Because MinGW is dependent upon Win32 API calls, it cannot provide a full POSIX API ; it is unable to compile some Unix applications that can be compiled with Cygwin.

This means that developers do not need a Windows installation with MSYS to compile software that will run on Windows without Cygwin.

Cygwin / X was originally based on XFree86, but switched to the X. Org Server, owing to concerns over XFree86's new software license not being compatible with the GPL.

One use for Cygwin / X is to provide a graphical interface for applications running on the same computer with Cygwin / X which are designed for the X Window System.

Parts of the GNU toolchain are also directly used with or ported to other platforms such as Solaris, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows ( via Cygwin and MinGW / MSYS ) and Sony PlayStation 3.

Dev-C ++ can also be used in combination with Cygwin or any other GCC-based compiler.

Cygwin consists of a library that implements the POSIX system call API in terms of Win32 system calls, a GNU development toolchain ( including GCC and GDB ) to allow software development, and a large number of application programs equivalent to those on Unix systems.

* The Cygwin DLL contains a console driver that emulates a Unix-style terminal within the Windows console.

* mintty ( Cygwin terminal )

Another use for Cygwin / X is as an X terminal: applications running on another computer access the Cygwin / X X server via the X protocol over an IP network.

One can run XDM on the remote system so that a user can log in to the remote computer via a window on the Cygwin / X system and then the remote system puts up web browsers, terminal windows, and the like on the Cygwin / X display.

rxvt is a terminal emulator for the X Window System ( and, in the form of a Cygwin port, for Windows ), originally written by Rob Nation and later extensively modified by Mark Olesen, who took over maintenance for several years.

Cygwin programs are installed by running Cygwin's " setup " program, which downloads the necessary program and feature package files from repositories on the Internet.

Cygwin also recognises NTFS junction points and symbolic links and treats them as POSIX symbolic links, but it does not create them as their semantics are not fully POSIX-compliant.

* Apart from always being linked against the Cygwin DLL, Cygwin executables are normal Windows executables.

The Cygwin Ports project provides many additional packages that are not available in the Cygwin distribution itself.

In addition, there are numerous virtualization solutions that provide x86 platform virtualization to run Windows and Unix-like operating systems simultaneously on the same hardware, but without the integration of the environments that Cygwin provides.

There are two ways to run Cygwin / X:

KDE on Cygwin is the port of the Qt toolkit and the KDE desktop environment ( both of which are commonly found in Linux ) to the Windows Operating System by using Cygwin, a POSIX emulation layer.

As with many emulation examples, not all the common KDE programs are guaranteed to work unmodified on KDE on Cygwin due to the complex interaction of all the libraries needed.

Instructions are also available for creating the executable using Cygwin.

Common examples are the MKS Toolkit ( sh, bash, ksh, csh, tclsh, rsh with version 8. 0 and subsequent ), UnxUtils, UWIN ( AT & T Unix for Windows, also abbreviated U / WIN ), Cygwin, DJGPP, Interix, and other programmes of the same type.

There are also other distributions, like ActivePerl, the Perl programming language for various operating system, and Cygwin distributions of open-source programs for Microsoft Windows.

Nowadays, the MinGW and Cygwin projects also provide such an environment based on the GNU Compiler Collection, using a stand-alone header file collection to make linking against Microsoft DLLs possible.

Derived from the Unix / Linux based IRC client, BitchX, TekNap runs in a command line environment natively on * nix OS machines and on Windows machines using a Cygwin dynamically linked library (. dll file.

* XWinLogon – Remote Access Client GUI based on Cygwin / X

* Wilmagate, C ++ based and is executable both in Linux and Windows / Cygwin environments