Comment by jbssm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbssm | Hacker News Reader

Strangely my workflow is in a place where most of my graphic programs also exist on Windows (Lightroom mostly, everything else is easily changeable).

It's my terminal workflow that I can only use on a Mac/Linux. Zsh, Vim, Tmux, LateX, Python and mostly a package manager (Apt on Linux, Homebrew on the Mac). Most of which I can just configure in a new system pulling the config files from my Github repository in less than 15 minutes after a fresh install.

That's what's mainly holding me from going back to windows (and the Application update process which is still awful as I can see from my VMware installation of Windows 10... seriously, updating the various components of Visual Studio in a semi manual way is just ridiculous), is there any good alternative for the Shell in windows that doesn't involve considerable tinking?

On Windows 10, I use babun along with a Vagrant VM for terminal-based development.

babun is a Cygwin distribution that's actually configured nicely out of the box with oh-my-zsh, etc. It comes with a very pretty terminal, a package manager, and more. That said, it's still Cygwin, which means I try to avoid doing complex, heavy-duty development in it.

For that, I just spin up a Vagrant VM. It's insanely easy.

This is a nice work method. But my biggest grip with it is that I use the GPU for CUDA calculations.

At least in OSX it's not possible to directly access the GPU trough a VM (in Vagrant or any other way), while in Linux it's possible with KVM.

How does it work on Windows?

I use MSYS2 which is probably as close as you'll get to a Linux environment for native windows programs. There is a port of pacman fire package management, and it has an xterm compatible terminal called mintty.

There's also Cygwin (and Babun is meant to be a nice configuration of this), but Cygwin tends to create an environment that is a bit more isolated from the rest of the system, while MSYS2 focuses more on working within the native environment.

MSYS2 uses pacman like Arch and has a lot of packages https://msys2.github.io

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