Do any friendly folks here have advice about shell choices in emacs on Windows 10? Using MSYS typically works well enough for me for simple commands, but I always have a separate Powershell window open for more detailed work and actually running my compiled binaries. Generally I have found the shell in emacs on Windows to be very finicky and difficult to use.
It has always been a minor pain point and I’ve had trouble finding reliable info. Ideally we could just use Powershell but I understand this is quite tricky. Powershell.el[1] didn’t actually work for me (beyond the editing mode) when I last tried it but I do see there’s a somewhat recent update.
WSL1 using a minimal rootfs from any debian distribution (so you can apt install things you need), accessed with wsltty as Windows Terminal has many issues (but supports tabs if you can live with it). This gives the best results overall: compatibility (amd64 instead of mingw), flexibility (apt install) speed (powershell 1) especially if you mount and access a CHD for your own files instead of using the regular tree inside NTFS.
Also, if you really like powershell, use the linux version next to bash
It has always been a minor pain point and I’ve had trouble finding reliable info. Ideally we could just use Powershell but I understand this is quite tricky. Powershell.el[1] didn’t actually work for me (beyond the editing mode) when I last tried it but I do see there’s a somewhat recent update.
[1] https://github.com/jschaf/powershell.el