Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows?

[Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1306 bytes --]

Hi,

I sometimes help friends at work trying out Emacs. We're mostly on Windows
and one thing that makes things harder is that some of the useful features
of Emacs uses external tools. I'm thinking specifically about small
utilities like diff, grep, etc. So, on Windows, useful features like Ediff
and the different grep-based tools do not work out of the box.

I see that we bundle some exe files in the bin directory of Emacs (bunzip2,
bzcat, etc.), could we include some of the other core utilities as well?

Of course, if you commit to use Emacs you can make sure to install these
tools in one of several ways it can be done today (Cygwin. MSYS, natively
compiled, etc.) but users could be up and running much faster if they did
not have to do this. If you are trying out Emacs and compare it with other
editors today, where some of this are also built in but work without these
external tools, you might give up.

Any comments and opinions on this? Does anything stop us from bundling a
few more useful utilities to make Emacs even more useful by default? I
think it should benefit many users.

Thanks!

/Mathias

PS. Of course, Emacs has support for many external tools, and one might
ask: where do we stop? But, I think the core features, mentioned above, are
good candidates to include by default.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1521 bytes --]