Ask HN: How do you make Windows sufferable?

by EJTH on 10/15/2016, 8:27 PM with 7 comments

Hi HN! I was just reinstalling windows 7 and this time I decided to try out Cygwin with apt-cyg and ConEmu and I am blown away by how awesome a combo it is. Having primarily used linux and osx for the past two years it is really nice. I can't understand how I could live without it.

I know there is the new ubuntu thing in windows 10 and all, but I didn't get to upgrade in time.

What other tools do you use to make windows more sufferable as a dev? Is it worth paying for the windows 10 upgrade if you are stuck on 7/8 and don't have any newer hardware?

  • by Eridrus on 10/15/2016, 10:41 PM

    I can't say anything about whether it's "worth it", but ubuntu on Windows has become my default shell for everything that will run there. Which is most command line utilities, build scripts, Ansible. I still run jupyter from the windows shell since zmq has some issues, and GPU stuff doesn't work there.

  • by HD142245b on 10/18/2016, 5:05 AM

    PortableApps is really good for keeping track of your programs, and making them, well, portable.

    http://portableapps.com/

    Also I highly recommend xplorer2, it's so much better than the built in file explorer: http://zabkat.com/

    There's a free alternative as well: http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/cubicexplorer_portabl...

  • by rurban on 10/15/2016, 10:23 PM

    WSL is a godsend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

    At least 10x faster than cygwin, and much more packages.

  • by hitsurume on 10/19/2016, 7:10 PM

    I wish windows had a iterm2 equivalent for terminal, the ability to use native copy + paste (cmd +c/v), highlight text for instant copy etc is what keeps me on mac over windows.

  • by bbcbasic on 10/16/2016, 12:39 AM

    Windows is quite sufferable for JS development: Node and NPM work fine for most things using cygwin as my preference to run it, can use Atom as an editor, git works fine etc.

    For other languages like Haskell say its a no-no you really have to do it in Linux (or Mac). So I run a VM in that case.