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Because running a VM still incurs a lot of overhead. Which is a bit excessive if all you want to do is run a terminal.

> if all you want to do is run a terminal

Then Git for Windows (which is built upon MinGW, and includes bash, grep and whatnot) + MinTTY is immensely more useful and lightweight than Cygwin.

Git for Windows uses MSYS, which is actually a fork of Cygwin. Compared to Cygwin, Git's MSYS distro is missing a lot of software and the version of Vim packaged with Git for Windows is a native Windows build (not MSYS-aware,) so it doesn't work in mintty. This can really bite you when editing a commit message or trying to do an interactive rebase. On my machine, Vim will just hang when started from an MSYS mintty.

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