Editing this… I fixed my first stoopid mistake but now I’m not getting correct responses from the msys window. I talked to an extremely helpful, ridiculously patient person on discord for about an hour, but I don’t want to take over someone else’s life with this.
Here’s the current picture: I followed the instructions for this: Learn C++ | Codecademy and broke off from the video to go to MSYS2 . Adding "C:\msys64\mingw64\bin in the environment variables only got me error messages from the command prompt window, so I ended up adding C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin\ instead. At first this didn’t work, but the command prompt now gives me the (paradoxically happy) message “fatal error”, only after many shut-downs and restarts of that window. Getting to this point also involved updating msys2: Updating MSYS2 - MSYS2 , however. After those updates I no longer get a correct response from msys2 with gcc --version Should I leave well enough alone?