I recently left a job that mandated Windows as a development environment. Well, that’s not strictly true – they were happy enough for me to use Linux in a VM, but that was ultimately more trouble than it was worth.
I’ve had to dip into Windows before (having worked a job where the server-side code was .Net), but I’ve never had to use it as a primary dev environment. Long story short: it is extremely painful to use Windows for modern web development, or any kind of development which is not explicitly for Windows.
Here is a statement of the main problems, and the measures which can get you at least close to a solution.
Git
An odd one to start with perhaps, but it has a significant impact on the rest of the setup. There are two ways you can get a usable Git setup working on Windows: one is to use Cygwin, of which more below, and one is Git for Windows, otherwise known as MSYS-Git. You can download a lightweight version of MSYS-Git as Git Bash – which, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear, comes with an implementation of Bash – but I’m going to advise getting the full installer. It should become clear why.
MSYS-Git is quite slow; apparently the version that you can use with Cygwin is faster, but Cygwin was too much of an overhead for my purposes.
The command line
Where to begin. The Windows command line is a disaster, unless all you need to do is change directories and open files. No grep. No vi. No sed. The knock-on effects, on editors and other tools which rely on these utilities, are not fun. I’d been recommended clink, which offers Bash-like completion, but it’s still … the Windows command line.
The options, if you want Bash or something like it, are Cygwin, effectively a complete replacement for the Windows command system, GoW (Gnu on Windows), a lighter-weight port of a set of Gnu utilities, or MSYS, a package similar to GoW, intended for compiling Gnu utilities on Windows. An outside choice is Eshell if you’re an Emacs user; I tried it, but found it didn’t fit well with my workflow.
Cygwin is a very comprehensive solution: it presumes you’re basically going to exist within it, which really didn’t work for me. GoW was nice, but didn’t play well with the Git-integrated Bash (see above), and neither did a separate install of MSYS. For these reasons, I suggest installing the complete MSYS-Git environment I mentioned above: you get Git, Bash and a decent subset of the Gnu utilities, all well-integrated.
A terminal emulator
That this is not a solved problem should give you some idea of The State of Things. There are two contenders, neither of which really represents an resounding victory: ConEmu and Console2. (Incidentally, are you noticing how much of this stuff is on Google Code? And SourceForge for heaven’s sake? The mind boggles). ConEmu is highly configurable. I do not need my terminal emulator to be highly configurable. Console2 is marginally easier to use, but pug ugly. I went for Console2.
Package management
The only real game in town here is Chocolatey. Like most community projects in the Windows world, it’s undermaintained and generally a bit thin, but at least it’s there. (And no disrespect to the maintainers here: it’s numbers I’m complaining about, not individual effort). Installs largely work; uninstalls or upgrades often don’t. But until Winbrew is reliable, there we are. I managed to get ack installed via Chocolatey, so two cheers for it, at least; all the packages mentioned above are available too.
Runtime/language version managers
I’m talking about the likes of nvm and chruby here. I used Nodist (because it was available on Chocolatey and nvmw wasn’t); there’s also pik for Ruby, but I couldn’t get it working.
Type
Call me frivolous, but I have a background in typography and I cannot stand the look of type on Windows. The fault lies with the anti-aliasing, which only works in the vertical plane; type looks spindly and horrible, no matter how you set it up. If you’re used to modern-looking type, as rendered on OS X or Ubuntu, and you have any sort of sensitivity to these things, you just can’t live with it.
It’s not a total solution, but MacType saved me clawing my eyes out, at least.
In summary
Attempting web development on Windows feels like being thrown back in time five years or so. I’ve touched on the main pain points, but I can’t even remember how many, many times I had to ransack Stack Overflow to find out why such-and-such a gem wouldn’t work properly, or dig about in the awful Registry. How many times I restarted the machine to be told that Windows had decided to install 127 updates. How long and often I watched the spinny blue circle while a bleedin’ Explorer window opened. Ubuntu, in a VM, was considerably faster and more usable in every way.
The larger problem is that the whole experience of working on Windows is so rotten that nobody wants to fix this stuff. Plenty of GitHub issues I followed, on large, respectable repos, were unresolved. ‘Windows,’ said the maintainers. Won’t fix. Closed.
I really can’t blame them, and similarly, I can see why the whole open-source movement is so backward on the Windows platform; hardly anyone’s there, and community is what keeps all this going. I hope, for the sake of the people who have to use it, that it gets better. I won’t be hanging around to see, though.