Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Switch to Windows

Well, I have accepted a job offer at Microsoft, and will be working pretty closely with .NET for three months this summer. This means that I will probably want to start using Windows again, because I believe it's a good idea to develop on the same system that you're developing for. I actually really like Windows 7, and I think that I will be happy using Windows as long as I can find some decent replacements for features I'm used to in Linux.

For example, I will probably look into command line features in Windows. I know about Cygwin, which is a POSIX compliant shell for Windows, but my past experience with Cygwin isn't very good. When I used Cygwin before, I found it was pretty slow, and was missing a lot of features I was used to. Probably I will want to look into more native solutions for Windows, and not a hack to use Unix programs. I would like to be able to open programs using ALT-F2 like in Linux, which I think is a useful feature, and also scrolling in windows that don't have mouse focus is a feature I'm very used to in Linux which is not the default behaviour in Windows.

I know that a lot of the programs I like in Linux are also supported in Windows, like Vim, Google Chrome, Open Office, Latex packages, ssh, and even 3rd party MSN Messenger clients like Pidgin, Empathy, and Emesene. In any case, I think working at Microsoft will provide me with the opportunity to become more familiar with Windows tools.

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