Ask HN: What tools do you recommend for working on Windows?

I'm a 22 years old hobbyist software developer and sysadmin enthusiast. I've been using linux in all my computers since I was 15 and I mainly program in Go, shell script, and Javascript. I work at a factory and recently for promoted to my first white collar position, so for the first time in my life I work at a computer. The position is production control, nothing to do with software development.

The computers at the company, however, are running Windows. It's very jarring going from 7 straight years of linux to Windows 10. I like creating scripts and tools for myself at home, so using Windows is often painful and feels like a slog. What I wanted to ask you is tools for making my experience less terrible. I recently discovered and started using AutoHotKey which is awesome and I'm sure will be of great use and I've also been trying to get into Excel programming (Excel is an important part of my job). What software would you recommend for someone in my position? The catch is that it must be something that doesn't have an "Install" step. Whenever I try to install anything it asks for an administrator password that I don't have, but things like notepad++ you just grab an .exe and run the program directly with no issues

What I'm missing is things like shell tools, shell scripts, text manipulations tools, rofi/dmenu, pdf tools, a rich text editor that isn't MS Word (I know markdown and html)

PowerToys.

I think there is a .MSI version laying around somewhere?

Maybe not anymore, I'm not finding it :(

I use Git bash for Windows. It brings a lot of the linux shell tools/scripting experience to Windows. There is a portable "thumbdrive edition."[1]

Look for the portable versions of other apps.

PowerShell[2] is the built-in scripting language for Windows (better than BATCH scripts).

I pop into gVim for quick text manipulation tasks.

https://sumatrapdfreader.org is the best PDF reader.

I recommend a launcher like https://keypirinha.com or even the MS PowerToys runner.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/download/win

[2]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/PowerShell

What exactly are you trying to script and manipulate on company computers? (i.e. are you just playing around or trying to write your own programs, or is there some business process you're trying to automate?)

Assuming you're just playing around and not trying to build something for business/professional use:

Can you access Powershell at all (the new-ish and improved Windows terminal)? You can write scripts in it.

If you prefer GNU/Linux apps, you can try a portable build of Cygwin (which lets you run Bash and some utils): https://github.com/MachinaCore/CygwinPortable (edit: or see Git Bash, as posted by Leftium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41052353)

Also check out Portable Apps: https://portableapps.com/apps

As a last resort, you might be able to put Linux on a USB drive (or disk drive, if it has one) and boot into that, if the BIOS lets you. Some of the Live CDs have a "diskless" mode that won't cause any permanent changes to the system.

There's probably also a lot of online tools that can do some of that inside a web browser (like word processors and PDF editors and text manipulation). You can also run code inside codesandbox/codepen/hosted code space of your choice. Or you can look for portable interpreters for Node (Javascript), maybe Python, Lua, etc.

For window management, Windows has some nice shortcuts built-in (like drag a window to a side to fill half the screen, windows+arrow keys to move things around, or Windows+tab or alt-tab to switch between apps, etc.

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On the other hand, if you're actually trying to write something for the company, you should probably talk to your IT department about it and collaborate on a solution. Don't write something bespoke that nobody else can maintain once you're gone (or just promoted). Especially if it's actually tied to some industrial processes!

Everyone does thing is stupidly inefficient ways.

For example, we need technical drawings of parts, the only way is through a web interface that fetches from some remote server and you can only do one at a time. So you will often see people copy pasting (or even typing if they're reading from paper) each item code one by one and printing one by one. Another common thing, we use SAP for most things but Excel is required for some stuff by my direct leader but also higher management and there's a lot of sort of awkward getting things out of SAP and into spreadsheets in the right format. So here some basic data manipulation is needed and you see literally everyone doing everything manually most of the time.

In general, I just want to not be wasteful and do repetitive things manually while using a computer with Windows, which is something I'm not used to

Using tool websites is a bit annoying since so much stuff is just blocked