Actually, cygwin offers everything I could possibly want from a Linux
environment. Recently, I even reinstalled it to make sure it doesn’t install an
X server as I noticed I don’t actually need it. I also tried MinGW
recently and even that – in spite of its horrible (read non-existant)
installation routine – would have sufficed, hadn’t it been for the lack of
screen.

I do know the unix2dos and dos2unix commands and even if I didn’t want to use
them, I knew how to emulate their behaviour with tools such as tr and sed.

You are right about Vim being able to chose the line endings automatically and I
also know how to tell Vim to use endings different than the ones detected. But
Vim isn’t really the problematic application in my case as there’s a native
windows version of it anyway.

The real problems arise with shell scripts and git. Shell scripts need Unix line
endings, otherwise they get into real trouble because of the extra newline at
the end of each line. Thus, it is not wise to convert these or the directories
containing them to window$ file endings.
Many other Unix tools, such as cat and sed, which output to to the console, tend
to convert the files on which they work, which becomes very annoying when using
them within scripts (which I do a lot). And if you tell cygwin to use window$
line endings only, these tools get really confused, rendering them practically
useless.

git is yet another big problem, as it destroys your repository after your first
commit if its directory doesn’t use unix line endings. I know there is a MinGW
port of git available, but this one only works on the window$ shell… a vicious
circle!

Thus I decided for the combination of Vim’s window$ version and cygwin with unix
line endings. That way, I only need to pay attention if I’m using shell scripts
on files which are intended to have window$ line endings. And here I must get
used to use unix2dos afterwards… just to be sure

You’re probably right, if you used Portable Ubuntu with vim (the Linux version of vim you could install within Portable Ubuntu, I mean), you’d probably get the same problems with your line endings, even when saving them to a NTFS partition. The reason why I thought PU more attractive than Cygwin is just that it offers you all the features of a true Linux system, and not just a few ported apps (though there are many of those, I should admit). Also it’s much more straightforward and comfortable to use

But now that I think about this CR/LF story, I actually don’t see much of a problem My first, spontaneous thought was to use the unix2dos utility, which has been around for a long time and does exactly what you want. But maybe you don’t want having to remember to run unix2dos on all your files each and every time you edited them. Though you could probably write a script that finds all Unix-style files in a directory, then runs unix2dos on each of them, and have this script being executed automatically each time before you commit something, this would also boil down to a lot of hacking…
\But\, I thought, \vim is such a powerful editor it certainly is able to do this by itself.\ So although you know vim a lot better than me, I asked Google and it came up with this:
http://vim.runpaint.org/editing/working-different-file-formats/
So it looks like vim does this automatically; doesn’t it? When you edit a Windows-style file, vim should save it Windows-style. Or does the problem only occur when you create a new file? Even then, you can tell vim to save it Windows-style, and I would be surprised if you couldn’t configure vim in such a way that it does this by default.

Anyway… my original thought was just that using a full-fledged Linux system with all available apps and everything you need within Windows (like, you could write bash scripts and cron jobs) would be nicer than just using some Linux tools that have been ported to Windows. Try it out if you like, I know you’ll be fine anyway

Malte

However, I’ll surely give this a shot sometime, though I don’t think it’ll not
suffer from the same issues as cygwin. As noted in the blog entry, Linux and
window$ user different line endings (as you are certainly aware of).

For the programs I’m writing, I must use the window$ line endings so that I
conform to the code of my colleagues, which is why I’m using the window$ version
of Vim. The unix tools I’m using – first and foremost git – need unix line
endings. It’s a slippery rope I’m wandering on every day to make sure I don’t
use the wrong endings.

But I’ll try Portable Ubuntu nevertheless. Maybe the Ubuntu guys have thought of
something the cygwin guys did not come up with.

you might want to have a look at Portable Ubuntu:
http://portableubuntu.sourceforge.net/

This will probably save you a lot of the troubles you’re having with Cywgin, and it’s much more comfortable too. Why, you’ll even have apt-get Just install Portable Ubuntu (and throw out Cygwin), and all your config files will be 100% compatible… I guess.
(To be honest I never used Portable Ubuntu myself, but that’s only because I don’t have to use Windows on an everyday basis, like you do. If I did, I’d most certainly try it _before_ I put myself to all the Cygwin hassle. I saw Portable Ubuntu several times now and it looks fantastic!)

Admittedly, it’s just a tiny bit more demanding on resources than Cygwin (though in my opinion, this is more than compensated by its ease of use and awesomeness!), so knowing you ol’ fanatic of lightweight programs, I guess you may stick with Cygwin all the same So on a related sidenote, you may also be interested in Cygwin Portable:
http://www.symbiosoft.net/cygwinportable
This is a different idea: it’s good old Cygwin, but installed on a USB stick. So you can carry around all your favorite Linux programs for Windows with you (along with your git repository), and you only have to do the hacking (e.g. for vim) once, instead of being forced to do it anew for every Windows system you’ll ever want to use Cygwin and your configuration files in

Cheers,

Malte