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Ask HN: Web developer on windows, what is your setup?

2 points by justinph ↗ HN
I'm looking at a web developer job at a place that is an all-windows shop, aside from a few testing boxes. I've been on a OS X for the last 9 years, so I really don't know the state of development tools in the Windows world. What are the good editors / IDEs / Tools (aside from Firebug) of course. Are you a web developer in a windows world? How do you cope?

They're also mostly PHP & rails whereas I've been doing php / xlst / django for the past few years.

6 comments

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pierrefar
Depends what you want really. For me, I use Notepad++ for everything. It's an awesome lightweight text editor with a teeny amount of sugar coating (syntax highlighting and code completion for PHP functions). They key point for it is that it's very fast and I like that.

Never really found a fast enough IDE and so can't advise you there. I can point you in the direction of Zend who do a PHP IDE that some people swear by.

Beyond that, there are good tools for anything you want really. SSH: PuTTY. SFTP: FileZilla.

And this new job: what are your would-be colleagues using? That would be a good start because they would help you out if need be.

sidmitra
Adding to the Notepad++ advice, it really is a good editor. But ofcourse if you're not already into emacs and stuff.

Other than that some "misc." tools i use

* Console2(http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/) - i have a lot of command windows open. The tabbed version is awesome, especially since i can run different shells in each of them. Eg. cygwin prompt in one, cmd.exe in another.

* Kitty instead of putty. It has automatic password filling etc.

* Batch scripts - i write batch scripts for everything. I start a lot of applications, enabling me to switch context to another project at once with one click, Eg.http://dpaste.com/216517/ Works best with virtuaenv if you're a python guy.

* virtuawin - for virtual windows.

* Ultramon - for multiple monitors

kloncks
smartFTP worked wonders for me back when I was on Windows.

SSH was great. So was FileZilla and Putty.

iwani
I use Notepad++ for all coding tasks. And FTP Surfer; a super lightweight FTP client that lets me work on the server using Notepad++. For SFTP, I use WinSCP

I've been using Firefox and firebug for a long time until just earlier this year when ff has become so bulky and sluggish my ram couldn't take it. So i switched to using chrome and its inline inspector

Oh yeah, another tool that I often use is WinMerge

Scott_MacGregor
* Zend Studio

* Subversion

* JIRA Bugtacker (It's cheap and I like this a lot)

* LAMP Stack on an inhouse dedicated 64 bit Dell development server

piehen
I'll second PuTTY & Filezilla. I have used WinSCP in the past but I remember being a little flaky.

As for IDE, Zend Studio looks pretty rad. I actually use an old copy of Dreamweaver 8 for the very sensible reason that I like the syntax highlighting colours (and I could never really quite bother to alter them in any other IDE). It just looks really nice and I feel happier coding in it! Before that I used Ediplus 2/3 which is nice lightweight editor, kinda similar to Notepad++.