My Windows 10 development environment

by | May 8, 2018 | Allgemein | 0 comments

Hey everyone,

last week I wrote about my switch from OSX to Windows 10 as development environment. Today, I can say I am still using Windows 10 and I am more familiar with it than ever before. I would like to talk about some issues and software I use for my daily business and why. So lets get started!

Hyper as Terminal

Recently I switched to the Hyper Terminal. I really like the design of it and with the Windows Manager you can arrange it really cool. Behind Hyper Terminal I still use Ubuntu as WSL and I am using zsh instead of bash. You can checkout my zsh configuration here: https://github.com/anthraxx/ant-zsh

Download Hyper

Vagrant

A more delicate topic is vagrant on windows with WSL. First thing: It is possible and it works, but with some drawbacks. The most import thing is to execute following command on your WSL:

export VAGRANT_WSL_ENABLE_WINDOWS_ACCESS=”1″

You need to install vagrant and Virtualbox on your windows machine. You also need to install vagrant on your WSL (careful the version must match the windows vagrant version). If this is done you can use vagrant as usual. My only drawback at the moment – I can’t use nfs. At the moment I have to work with rsync for synced folders, which isn’t very optimal but ok for now.

I am using vagrant a lot for web development, if you haven’t used vagrant yet you should give it a try. 

Download Vagrant
Download Virtualbox

Virtual Desktops

Windows 10 introduced the multiple desktop feature, which is quite nice and I am used to use many desktops from OSX. I always having specific applications on specific desktops. I also usually work with two monitors. While the terminals stay always on my notebook monitor the applications cycle through the different desktops on my primary desktop. Unfortunately there are two flaws on the virtual desktop feature for Windows 10 I identified.

  1. You can’t assign apps to starts on a specific desktop – To solve this I usually start all applications at once and then move them to the right desktop on TaskView or I go to the right desktop first and then start the app.
  2. There isn’t a shortcut, I know of, to switch to a specific desktop. My solution for that problem is to have the applications in my taskbar in the right order with this little trick I can use WindowsKey + 1 for Chrome, which is on Desktop 1 or WindowsKey + 2 for Phpstorm, which is on Desktop 2.


Other Software I use

Android Studio / PyCharm / PhpStorm – They are nearly the same base, but for different programming languages. These products work as expected and there is no difference to the OSX versions except the shortcuts.

Blender for 3D Modeling works fine having no problems at all. Cool tip is to use your surface in presentation mode and plugin an external keyboard. Then you can use the surface pen and having all num pad related hotkeys at the same time.

Office Stuff – As written in the post from last week I am using the Office 365 package. Mostly I use Outlook 2016, OneNote, Word and Excel. Before I worked a lot with google docs, spreadsheets. OneNote is definitely a really cool tool and I use it for a lot of different tasks. Game Design concepts, brainstorming ideas, todo lists and of course notes.

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