Back to Windows

I’ve been coming back to Visual Studio and Windows development after a 5 year stint with web developement on OSX. Definitely feeling some friction in Windows:

• cmd window doesn’t resize or copy/paste, can’t clear with shortcut.
• no package manager [not sold on chocolately]
• Visual Studio is big and heavy
• TFS is slow and merging across branches loses history.

So, here’s some things I’ve found that make the transition a bit better.

Visual Studio Plugins:

Fix File Encoding - automatically strip UTF-8 signature from html/js
Code Compare - a better code compare
File Nesting - handy for managing partials by nesting them under their ‘parent’ in a VS project/solution. Build Monitor - Show how long builds take
Web Analyzier - Incorporate ESLint, TSLint into Visual Studio

Windows apps:

Diffmerge - great for comparing files/folder
ConEmu - great command shell replacement (supports, cmd, bash, etc.)
AstroGrp - FOSS gui grep
AutoHotkey - swiss army knife for windows keyboard shortcuts. I currently have shortcuts for volume up/down and found a script that lets me Ctrl+L to clear cmd!
Launchy - Like Spotlight/Alfred
Robocopy - built in windows command for better, restartable copies. There’s a GUI to help navigate all the knobs.
LICECAP - cross platform animated gif screen capture.