While MinGW is great for some things, I prefer Cygwin, which is more complete and the package manager is a particular godsend. It's common for Windows ports to

While MinGW is great for some things, I prefer Cygwin, which is more complete and the package manager is a particular godsend. It's common for Windows ports to package their own MinGW version (Strawberry Perl, MSYS-Git, ...), which is less than awesome, but you can compile the things you need from source. It's often a bit tricky, though (I used to compile Git and Perl from source because at the time the Cygwin packages were either non-available or outdated, but it's not for the faint of heart). As Cygwin comes with MinGW cross-compiler packages, I no longer keep a separate MinGW/MSYS environment around, and I'm reasonably happy with this setup.