Back and Upgraded

Okay, so working in Windows is possible, but everything is smoother and faster on OSX.

Things Learned (and the long silence)

Don’t Trust Bash in Windows on Win10-Home

I actually tested the ‘Bash in Windows’ fairly heavily over the Summer and was not entirely impressed. (I will refer to it as Win-Bash from here on out.) It is basically a functional VM which remotely accesses the base-level Windows Kernel (as told by one of the Windows Developers at OSCON).

This sounds great, until you realize that it makes these calls, as I noted, within a tiny containerized VM. This means those commands executed via Win-Bash are not available by Windows within the GUI. For example, MySQL commands can be executed, but only if going through this really odd step-by-step process to create an SSH to the Shell.

The downsides do not truly affect self-contained programs such as Git (which pretty much does its thing), until you wish to use a git push. Because of the ‘container’ running on the Kernel, it does not actually use the same SSH Keys like software such as Git-GUI or Git-Bash. For the savvy user this means maintaining two SSH Keys (in a weird setup) or only completing pushes from outside the Win-Bash.

Likewise on tools like Ruby, Jekyll, bower, Node, etc.

To Developer on Windows 10, get Pro

Sad to say, but its true.

Hyper-V, a really cool ‘built-in’ VM tool on Windows, is only available on Windows10 Pro. With Docker dropping Windows10-Home support (due to requiring Hyper-V to work on Windows), almost all of the Web-Dev tools I use for Windows have become questionably functional.

Okay, so you don’t HAVE to have Pro

The following programs still work well on Windows-Home and make for a great local Developer’s solution (when automation and Third-Party tools like SASS/SCSS, Grunt, Gulp, etc. aren’t required).

  • Node.js: It technically works and installs, but good-luck getting packages which don’t got sideways at random times.
  • PHPStorm: Its PHPStorm. It works. The only difference / downside the Dev will find between OSX and Windows is having PowerShell instead of iTerm.
  • PowerShell: If you’re going to use the Command Prompt and you learned on Bash, try http://cmder.net/. I have been told the PowerShell is pretty awesome, but my knowledge base is heavily within Bash Scripting, so the Cmder Bash-Emulator is a great tool.
  • Visual Studio: Seriously, if you’re going to Developer on Windows, get Visual Studio and run through some Microsoft University Tutorials. I’ve never really gotten into the … groove… of Visual Studio, but it is a massively powerful IDE. Seriously. Baked/Built in Debugging, Testing, and Collaboration, while supporting a bunch of integrations with other packages like Microsoft SQL Server, Azure’s .NET SDK, and tons more.

Back on OSX

Bash-IT

After giving it just over half a year Dev’ing on Windows, I’m back on OSX (for home Dev, never gave it up for work. I was testing, not crazy!!)

The first thing I found, which is amazing, is a little tool called Bash-IT. As a “shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh“, Bash-IT has enough ‘out-of-the-box’ Bash Configurations to suit anyone’s flavor.

See https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it/wiki/Themes for Available Bash-IT Themes.

To Be Continued

Look me up

“No man is an island.” ~ John Donne (1624)

If there’s a mistake, let me know. If I can make it better, let me know.

Thoughts, recommendations, good recipes for cooking pumpkin:

Twitter - @c_leverington github - cleverington d.o - cleverington