Hi all,

First, an apology: I have been slow to respond to trouble reports over the
past few weeks.  The reason is that I was working on the Windows port
described below, and that work turned out to take considerably longer than
expected.  I am sorry for the delay and will work through the backlog of
reports now that this is done.

*GNU APL 2.0* is now available as a native Windows installer:

*GNU_APL_2_0_Setup.exe*

It can be downloaded from a GNU mirror near you.
The official mirror list is at:

https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

Look for the file *GNU_APL_2_0_Setup.exe* in the *apl/ *directory.

The installer includes:

  * apl.exe — a native Windows executable (no Cygwin, no WSL required)
  * A built-in Right Alt keyboard mapping for APL characters
  * The GNU APL font (covers the full APL character set)
  * A preferences file with sensible Windows defaults

The keyboard mapping deserves a note.  Previous attempts to provide an
APL keyboard on Windows (registry edits, MSKLC layouts, PowerToys, the
Dyalog IME) all ran into problems that made them unreliable or impossible
to install without administrator rights.  The new approach builds the
mapping directly into apl.exe: holding Right Alt while typing a letter
produces the corresponding APL character, using the same layout as
]KEYB command or the GNU APL *xmodmap* files on Linux.  No additional
software or administrator rights are needed.

The executable was cross-compiled on Linux using MinGW-w64 and tested on
Windows 11.  Compiling with *MinGW* was relatively straightforward. The really hard nuts were the APL font and the keyboard mapping. I followed, with the help of Claude Code many dead ends before we found the solution. Creating the code for all these dead ends would have been entirely impossible without the help of
Claude Code. It was outright amazing to see how many things that work
out-of-the-box in GNU/Linux resp. POSIX failed to work under WIndows.

Bug reports are welcome at *[email protected]* as always.

Best regards,
Jürgen


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