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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

I never thought I’d say it but because of this exact setup with VS Code I’ve actually stopped using my MBP at home in favor of my desktop, which was really only built with gaming in mind. I’ve now gotten used to having all the extra computing power at hand and would struggle to go back to a laptop as my primary development machine.

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I'm in the same boat.

I'm looking at selling my Mac and just getting an iPad to replace it - running Windows 10 + WSL + VSCode on my desktop pc is more pleasant for me to code at home with than my macbook.

I've stopped coding on my 2012 Macbook Air in favour of my desktop PC for similar reasons. The fact that my ports are shared between Windows and Linux makes the web dev I do a dream.

The new Terminal app is great too. I've got all the same split pane stuff that I rely on in iTerm, including useful keyboard shortcuts for switching between them and resizing them. I'm very impressed.

I'm currently trying to do the same, I'm sick of running out of ram on my MBP. What software/setups do you find indispensable to move to Windows? I'm not a first time Windows-only user, but first time to do full development work. For what it's worth I already use VSCode, I'm doing FE Development, and I use Docker a lot. I'm kind of unsure due to having to lose my Mac-specific tools such as Maccy (Clipboard Manager) and Alfred (Quick Launcher).

But why could not you do the same before? Even before WSL there was MSYS, which IMO is great, unless you need to compile a C program, that directly uses Linux headers.

It’s possible I could have and I just wasn’t sufficiently in the know about which tools to use. I hadn’t used MSYS. I’ve taken my current workflow so far as to even use nix as my primary package manager. Would this have been easily possible before? I ask in earnest. My setup right now is such that even mildly arcane things like that just seem to work for the most part.

Turns out "nix" is hard to search due to engines matching "*nix" to it.

Nix is probably not supported on MSYS, but YMMW. I'd love to have something like it on Windows.

With WSL I'm running stock Debian so every too I use is just an apt-get away. I don't run anything on the Windows side for development except VS Code.

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