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Ask HN: What's your Windows {web} development software set-up?
2 points by desigooner on Aug 20, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I just bought a new laptop recently and am in the process of setting it up for development on the go.

I just saw the MacOS thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618817) and I figured I'd ask the HN on what everyone's favored setup is, web development or otherwise. I've been using a Macbook for the past 2+ years that just gave away and I decided that Windows 7 was a good reason to move back to the windows platform, not to mention the $$$ i saved on a better specced machine.

Currently, I have:

Notepad++ (IDE) FileZilla (FTP) Microsoft Office Chrome + Firefox with Firebug Dropbox (To sync files across machines) Paint.NET (For minor image manipulation) Launchy (Application Launcher)

I was on the lookout for some more software that'd make my life easier. -- Is there a good replacement for OmniGraffle Pro? -- Also, what's the best tool for Screenshots (preferabbly a tool that auto-uploads to the web for easy sharing) like Skitch or Cloud App. -- A good lightweight to-do list like SimpleTask

Thanks.



You didn't mention what kind of web development you are doing. If you are into node.js, ruby or modern nosql databases, you should definitely install cygwin and mingw. These environments let you compile most posix stuff, like you could do on Mac OSX. Plus they have nearly a complete set of all command line tools you might know. (bash, grep, find, awk, sed, ...)


I recently started playing with phpStorm from jetbrains (the people who make intelliJ). I've only been using it for about a week, but so far it seems to be a great php editor and by far the best javascript IDE I've used. If you don't use php they have a cheaper version called webStorm which only does javascript, html and css. My only real complaint is that is a bit of a memory hog and sometimes feels quite sluggish on my netbook.

Other than that generally use topstyle 4 for html and css and pyscripter for python. All of which I'm very happy with.


Zend Studio for Eclipse, Putty, and FileZilla are pretty much all I need for PHP development.




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