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You can't just say something like that unqualified. My life is made better daily by the presence of symlinks.

My life under Windows is made worse daily by its lack of, among other niceties of civilization, symlinks.

Hard-links would also be a nice addition. I am sure NTFS supports them deep inside it.

NTFS does indeed support both symbolic links and hard links in recent versions of Windows, and they can be created with the "mklink" command-line utility. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link)

NTFS always supported links, but there was no interface to actually using them from the Win32 subsystem. However the POSIX subsystem could use them since NT 3.5 at least.

is this support used by cygwin?

From memory, yes. Also, GNUS uses hardlinks, and it worked for me under Windows XP.

In fact I strongly suggest you consider ntfslink (http://elsdoerfer.name/=ntfslink) which provides a nice UI for doing all this in explorer.

As far as I can tell, reparse points for directories will usually work perfectly well for most of the things you'd expect them to. I use them, and a subversion repository to version control pretty much everything config related on my windows machine.

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