Programming on Windows

, since chances are, you'll be using Apple Macs and Linux systems during your career, and those all use BASH.

We need to install Git for Windows, which comes with BASH and Git command-line tools.

Download and install the .exe file from here: https://git-scm.com/download/win

Once that's done, we need a good and cool-looking terminal.

The Terminal

On my mac, I use iTerm2, which can do a lot of nice things, like opening new shells in a split view, very useful if you need to control different tasks at once.

A great terminal for windows is Hyper, made by a great company - Zeit. It has all the things that my iTerm2 has, and it is very lite and customizable since it's made with JavaScript.

You can download it here: https://hyper.is

Once installed, we would need to tell Hyper to use previously installed BASH instead of MS-DOS.

In the top right corner click on the menu: Edit --> Preferences…

This will open a file called ".hyper.js" which contains a JSON where all Hyper settings live and where you can change the appearance of the terminal like font size, colors, etc.

We need to find the line starting with shell and add the path to previously installed BASH, and change the shellArgs line too.

Should look like this:

shell: "C:/Program Files/Git/bin/bash.exe",

shellArgs: ["-i"],

Then reload the terminal by clicking on the menu: View --> Full Reload

And voila! Your cool terminal is now using BASH!

The Editor

For writing code I mainly use VS Code by Microsoft, it's free and it has great tools, you can customize it quite easily with a huge marketplace of extensions at your disposal. VS Code also has an integrated terminal that can use the same BASH shell we've installed before.

You can download it here: https://code.visualstudio.com

And that's it! I've been using this setup this weekend and I didn't feel like I was missing something when compared to my MacBook.

Of course, some things require a little time to get used to, like Windows shortcuts and desktop tabs management, but that's a matter of time.

**It felt productive working with this setup. So there cannot be any excuses here, you can develop quite comfortably even on a Windows PC! **