Cygwin Quickstart for Drupal Users

Cygwin is a great set of Unix/Linux utilities for Windows. Here are quickstart instructions for using it in a Drupal context (for git, patch, ssh, or whatever)

• Grab the small setup.exe from http://cygwin.com
• Run it. If you're on Windows Vista or later, you'll want to run the setup with administrative privileges (Right click on setup.exe and "Run as administrator")
• Take all the defaults - we'll end up with an install in c:\cygwin
• When you get to the package selection screen, select at least: openssh, git, rxvt, patch, patchutils, telnet, unzip, nano, vim, rsync, wget, connect-proxy. Then let it download and install.
• Run "Rxvt Native" from the start menu. (If on Vista or later, you need to run it as administrator this time because we'll be setting up links in a privileged directory). The first time you do this it will install default profile files for you.
• In rxvt we'll now set up symbolic links to the Windows filesystem. Do this for each drive you have... I'm showing the C: and D: drives here:
cd /
ln -s /cygdrive/c
ln -s /cygdrive/d

• Now you can navigate into the Windows filesystem to wherever your Drupal install is. /c is the root of the C: drive; /d is the root of the D: drive. For example, if you have Acquia's DAMP installed, it might be in /c/Users/rfay/Documents/Sites/acquia-drupal or something like that.
• Using cvs, you could check out the Examples project, for example:
  export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib
cvs login (your password is 'anonymous')
cvs -z6 checkout -d examples-HEAD contributions/modules/examples

  and now you have a HEAD version of Examples.
• Using git you could get Examples from git.drupalfr.org:
  
git clone git://git.drupalfr.org/git/contributions-new-date/examples.git

• Or apply a patch using patch.... or create a patch using git diff --no-prefix...

The world is your oyster. You have the easy-to-use editor nano if you want to edit within Cygwin, but you can just use the Windows editor of your choice as well.

You may also want to watch the Lullabot video on installing Cygwin, which is old, but still useful and valid.

Edit: You can now use drush successfully on Windows! See Installing Drush on Windows Using Cygwin.