Audience
Developers in need of a software distribution and building platform for Windows
About MSYS2
MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries providing you with an easy-to-use environment for building, installing and running native Windows software. It consists of a command line terminal called mintty, bash, version control systems like git and subversion, tools like tar and awk and even build systems like autotools, all based on a modified version of Cygwin. Despite some of these central parts being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to provide a build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts are kept at a minimum. MSYS2 provides up-to-date native builds for GCC, mingw-w64, CPython, CMake, Meson, OpenSSL, FFmpeg, Rust, Ruby, just to name a few. To provide easy installation of packages and a way to keep them updated it features a package management system called Pacman, which should be familiar to Arch Linux users.
Other Popular Alternatives & Related Software
Cygwin
Get that Linux feeling on Windows. Cygwin is a large collection of GNU and open-source tools that provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows. And a DLL (cygwin1.dll) that provides substantial POSIX API functionality. Cygwin is not a way to run native Linux apps on Windows. You must rebuild your application from the source if you want it to run on Windows. It can't magically make native Windows apps aware of UNIX® functionality like signals, ptys, etc. Again, you need to build your apps from source if you want to take advantage of Cygwin functionality. The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86_64 versions of Windows, starting with Windows Vista. Use the setup program to perform a fresh install or to update an existing installation. Keep in mind that individual packages in the distribution are updated separately from the DLL so the Cygwin DLL version is not useful as a general Cygwin distribution release number.
Learn more
Pacman
Pacman is a utility which manages software packages in Linux. It uses simple compressed files as a package format, and maintains a text-based package database (more of a hierarchy), just in case some hand tweaking is necessary. Pacman does not strive to "do everything." It will add, remove and upgrade packages in the system, and it will allow you to query the package database for installed packages, files and owners. It also attempts to handle dependencies automatically and can download packages from a remote server. Version 2.0 of Pacman introduced the ability to sync packages (the - sync option) with a master server through the use of package databases. Prior to this, packages would have to be installed manually using the --add and - upgrade operations.
Learn more
fpm
fpm is a tool that lets you easily create packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and more! fpm isn’t a new packaging system, it’s a tool to help you make packages for existing systems with less effort. It does this by offering a command-line interface to allow you to create packages easily. FPM is written in ruby and can be installed using gem. For some package formats (like rpm and snap), you will need certain packages installed to build them. Some package formats require other tools to be installed on your machine to be built; especially if you are building a package for another operating system/distribution. FPM takes your program and builds packages that can be installed easily on various operating systems. It can take any nodejs package, ruby gem, or even a python package and turn it into a deb, rpm, pacman, etc. package.
Learn more
Shell Assistant
•SSH and SFTP client •Shell Terminal •SFTP File manager •SFTP code editor •Custom tab & split window layouts •Switch between workspaces •Connection, key & password management •Stream audio and video, view images and pdf's, edit code over SFTP •Tunnel network ports •Text editor-like command editing •Paste history •Free & ad-free •Respects your privacy
Connect to remote hosts over SSH, including Amazon Web Service EC2, Linodes, Digital Ocean or Raspberry Pis. Connect to local unix-like installations running Mac OS, Linux, MinGW, Cygwin, Git-bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux. A great tool for your toolbox if you work with Unix, Linux, Mac Command Line, Raspberry Pi's or anything that uses a Command Line Interface.
To download the latest version, please visit shellassistant.com.
Learn more
Pricing
Starting Price:
Free
Free Version:
Free Version available.
Integrations
Company Information
MSYS2
www.msys2.org
Videos and Screen Captures
Other Useful Business Software
Stop vibe-debugging.
AppSignal's MCP server hands Claude, Cursor, or Zed your real errors, traces, and the deploy that shipped them. AI writes the fix; you review the diff.
Product Details
Platforms Supported
Windows
Training
Documentation
Support
Online
