As of this moment, I am officially free of cygwin. Until now, I depended on cygwin to provide a unixy enough environment to build KevEdit under Windows. Now I have MSYS, the minimal shell environment for MingW. Not only does it build and run KevEdit's configure script better than cygwin, but it also works with the precompiled SDL libraries so I don't have to compile SDL myself.

Cygwin has so many weird behaviors, like not being able to find libraries in obvious places for reasons I've never quite figured out. You also have to be careful not to build your program so that it depends on the cygwin DLL, since that file cannot be distributed very freely. Vanilla MingW with MSYS doesn't have any such problems.

And MSYS uses rxvt, a fast minimal xterm client that I loved using in Linux back in my 486 days. rxvt has trouble hooking into stdin and stdout correctly when running some (DOS?) programs, but I can live with that. It's so nice finally having the select-to-copy and middle-click-to-paste features in Windows now. DJGPP could never deliver that. To be fair, I had rxvt working in Cygwin at one point, but it was hard to set up right.

Sorry if all that was a bit obscure, but hey, so am I.