Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

I have both Windows and Linux installed on this machine. I try to stay away from Windows for anything closely related to programming. It's a pain in the ass. Once you have to touch the terminal, things start to get messy, and it's hard to ignore the terminal when programming. Granted, I use the terminal more than the average coder, but I still would never touch it. That said, to answer your question, you probably want to install the Bash on Ubuntu on Windows thing, which should allow you to run git, bash, etc. on Windows without having to use cygwin.

Do not use or even rely on windows file-history for backups!

It can and does fail silently. (e.g. with too long path names or simply no backup drive attached in a long time)

I am very happy that I am the first one to comment here about https://www.listary.com/ which is the best suggestion which again, I got here. Install it.

For SSH: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Install-Win...

For "unix", you can actually run linux on windows now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui...

If you want to use windows store, it acts like any other walled garden store regarding "binary blobs", but personally I have never used this. The only software I have in windows is Steam which acts like an "app store" for games.

Now, I use Linux almost exclusively (there are one or two games I boot my gaming machine to windows to play), but it's actually gotten better over the years, not worse.

Just remember to block all the telemetry stuff in your firewall. https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker

(Assuming Win 10)

- If you have a HiDPI screen, you may run into problems with older programs looking blurry. The fix is to right click on the .exe, click 'Properties', go to the 'Compatibility' tab, and check the box next to "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings".

- File extensions are hidden by default in the file manager. To turn them on, open File Explorer, go to the 'View' tab, and check the box next to "File name extensions".

- Use a text editor like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code which lets you switch back and forth with your line endings and encodings; Some editors coughNotepadcough add a BOM to the front of your unicode documents. (As an aside, I've been using the FTP plugin for Notepad++ lately, and it is just a pleasure to use.)

- Between Powershell and WSL, there's rarely anything you can't do on the command line as long as you're willing to code switch a little. In particular, WSL works great for SSH. Cmder is a wrapper around ConEmu (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) and makes for a great terminal environment.

- Chocolatey is the closest thing Windows has to a package manager. (I'm still hoping that OneGet becomes a thing.)

- Other recommended programs: Everything search (life changing, bind it to a hotkey and never look back), Sumatra PDF, Glasswire, CCleaner, either Irfanview or Xnview, WinDirStat.