Ask HN: Your development environment on Windows 10?
I’m a full-stack web developer and I’ve recently built a pc, having previously been working on Macs for the last 5+ years.
Im finding it difficult to create a productive development environment on Windows. There seem to be a couple of popular approaches; WSL, Hyper V vms, VirtualBox vms, git bash, ...
What does your setup look like?
23 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadOtherwise, PyCharm + Chrome. I have VirtualBox for some VMs that I need sometimes (specific software that needs to be installed, etc..)
I used Conda for Python environments.
Stack: Django + SQLite or .net core with MSSQL No VM: My computer keeps freezing. I am thinking about going docker at some point.
Browser: FF and Chrome
If for some reason this isn't achievable, use VMWare?
Alternatively, you could always Hackintosh your new PC.
A whole lot of tools like python, php and node work flawlessly on windows these days. For something that does not work, you can always drop into wsl.
text editor - Notepad++
git client - SourceTree
CLI - Cygwin
Git Bash is a lightweight alternative if you don't want to completely switch your OS. Though mainly intended to provide you with a proper UI for running Git commands in order do so it has to create a UNIX-like shell environment, which provides many additional benefits for running other development tools with a CLI as well.
I don't know if the Linux subsystemd for Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10) would work instead of Cygwin but looks quite good.
For Linux dev, I have Debian installed on a VM in VirtualBox, and this workflow works pretty nicely for me. It can be a pain in the ass to get the Guest Additions set up, but once you've got the hang of it for your system it's not so bad.
For Node, I tend to side more with Linux than Windows, purely because I use a Mac at work. Node and Python work great with Windows, but I can't say I've ever tried nvm in Windows, so it'll be down to your personal workflow and whether you can translate that over. For me, Python works just as well on Windows as it does on Linux.
I always have Notepad++ installed on Windows for quick edits, config files etc. Git Bash is helpful on Windows too as it adds a few useful bash tools, I can SSH properly (with keys) to my other machines for example.
I've been swinging between the Jetbrains IDEs, Atom and VS Code over the last year but I think I'm settled with VS Code now.
I'm using Hyper for terminal, or VS Code's terminal.
If you need some unix tools you should just go for Linux Subsystem for Windows.
http://fullbit.ca/create-your-own-development-environment-in...
Git for Windows, and SourceTree for all serious Git work except interactive rebase.
For building, testing and packaging, Docker. This way I don't need to spend lots of time maintaining runtimes for all languages and environments. If things go weird I just factory reset the Docker installation.
I used to do choco and a lot of tools maintenance, but that is all history with Docker in the mix.