
Ask HN: How do you make Windows sufferable? - EJTH
Hi HN! I was just reinstalling windows 7 and this time I decided to try out Cygwin with apt-cyg and ConEmu and I am blown away by how awesome a combo it is. Having primarily used linux and osx for the past two years it is really nice. I can&#x27;t understand how I could live without it.<p>I know there is the new ubuntu thing in windows 10 and all, but I didn&#x27;t get to upgrade in time.<p>What other tools do you use to make windows more sufferable as a dev? Is it worth paying for the windows 10 upgrade if you are stuck on 7&#x2F;8 and don&#x27;t have any newer hardware?
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Eridrus
I can't say anything about whether it's "worth it", but ubuntu on Windows has
become my default shell for everything that will run there. Which is most
command line utilities, build scripts, Ansible. I still run jupyter from the
windows shell since zmq has some issues, and GPU stuff doesn't work there.

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HD142245b
PortableApps is really good for keeping track of your programs, and making
them, well, portable.

[http://portableapps.com/](http://portableapps.com/)

Also I highly recommend xplorer2, it's so much better than the built in file
explorer: [http://zabkat.com/](http://zabkat.com/)

There's a free alternative as well:
[http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/cubicexplorer_portabl...](http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/cubicexplorer_portable)

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rurban
WSL is a godsend
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux)

At least 10x faster than cygwin, and much more packages.

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EJTH
But I guess it requires Win10? In that case it will be when I have to upgrade
this old heap anyways :)

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hitsurume
I wish windows had a iterm2 equivalent for terminal, the ability to use native
copy + paste (cmd +c/v), highlight text for instant copy etc is what keeps me
on mac over windows.

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bbcbasic
Windows is quite sufferable for JS development: Node and NPM work fine for
most things using cygwin as my preference to run it, can use Atom as an
editor, git works fine etc.

For other languages like Haskell say its a no-no you really have to do it in
Linux (or Mac). So I run a VM in that case.

