
Ask HN: Switching to Developing on Windows from Mac - sunsetMurk
I&#x27;ve been mostly on a mac for the past 6 years professionally and personally. I&#x27;m about to switch up my daily driver to a Windows box. I&#x27;m looking for any tips when it comes to a &#x27;modern&#x27; development toolkit for someone who&#x27;s been enveloped within the the mac&#x2F;unix ecosystem for the past few years but is making a switch. I love my tools, and would love to hear what people&#x27;s kits are comprised of and why.. I feel it&#x27;d be useful even if we work on completely different stuff.<p>More context:
I was a windows user and then developer from windows 95-&gt;10 and then went mac full-time when I wanted a nice laptop and began dabbling with iOS dev more seriously. Since then I&#x27;ve found myself accustomed to the unix terminal, homebrew, and a ton of other tools and things like that which I use on a daily basis for work and side-projects. Right now mostly node&#x2F;javascript and other front-end&#x2F;web stuff.<p>The new computer arrives later this week so I started googling &quot;windows alternative to x&quot;, so figured I&#x27;d see if anyone on here recently switched from mac to PC... Any tips? Anything to be super happy about? Any things I&#x27;ll need to work-around?<p>Things I&#x27;ll be taking with me... 
- VScode
- Creative Suite<p>Things I know I&#x27;ll miss... 
- homebrew (+ a ton of stuff that I manage w&#x2F; this)
- iTerm
- oh my zsh
- spotlight &amp; alfred
- iStat Menus
- Spectacle
- rocket 
- native git?<p>Things I&#x27;ve heard to use...
- powershell (how does this compare to how I use iTerm?)<p>ps. I don&#x27;t want to use Linux on this computer, and pardon the formatting&#x2F;braindump for this post. :-)
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TheWiseOne
Look into Cmder ([http://cmder.net/](http://cmder.net/)) for an alternative to
iTerm/zsh. You can also try Babun
([https://babun.github.io/](https://babun.github.io/)).

Try Wox ([http://www.wox.one/](http://www.wox.one/)) as a replacement for
Alfred.

And Chocolately ([https://chocolatey.org/](https://chocolatey.org/)) and Scoop
([https://scoop.sh/](https://scoop.sh/)) to replace Homebrew.

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user68858788
The Linux subsystem for windows makes my workflow nearly identical, and is
absolutely better than something like putty.

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copperx
I've heard that disk I/O is excruciatingly slow. Has that been your
experience?

