From time to time I’m forced to use that other operating system and I miss the tools that I enjoy under Linux. For example, flyspell doesn’t work because there is no ispell. Fortunately it is possible to fix this by installing cygwin and ispell/cygwin.

Brian Wood wrote instructions how to set everything up back in 2006. A quick summary:

Download cygwin/ispell binaries from ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz which should be extracted from the cygwin root directory – it installs files into /usr/local/…

Add the cygwin paths to your environment. I prefer to do this at emacs start-up (my cygwin is installed in the non-standard c:/packages/cygwin )

(setenv "PATH" (concat (getenv "PATH" ) ";c:\\packages\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin" ";c:\\packages\\cygwin\\bin" ))

Update: I’ve moved over to aspell which I found in the text section of the cygwin installer as per the comment from emacs user. Thanks.