Summary of SoCraTes 2016 Session "Hey dude, where is my tool chain?" - Working on Windows as a Linux

This year on the conference SoCraTes I hosted a session for the first time. It was about working on a Windows system from the perspective of a Linux user.  A big thank to @ndrssmn, who motivated to host this session.

@yooogan was so nice to summarize the session in the SoCraTes wiki (big thank for that).  But the wiki page is only accessible for SoCraTes participants, so we decided that I republish it on my blog. Enjoy it.

Console/Shell

• Babun - Based on Cygwin, includes a CLI package manager (pact - like apt, yum, …) and preconfigured oh-my-zsh as shell
• ConEmu - feature rich console emulator with tabs
• Console2 (original)/(modified fork) - console emulator, multi tabs, configurable mouse behavior
• PuTTY - ssh client (when you don't have Babun/Cygwin anyway)

File Management

• FreeCommander - Replacement for Windows Explorer / TotalCommander
• SourceTree - graphical Git and Mercurial client
• WinSCP - graphical scp
• FreeFileSync - multi-platform file synchronization

Text Editors

• Notepad++ - all-purpose editor, syntax highlighting, file monitoring (tail -f)
• Atom - editor; same settings in all your environments

Diff/Merge

• kdiff3 - nice directory compare mode
• p4merge
• Meld
• BeyondCompare - commercial, but powerful (3-way merge, plugins to compare .doc/.pdf/etc.)

Searching

• Agent Ransack - GUI searcher
• ack - multi-platform (single Perl script) grep replacement - faster and with good defaults for source trees
• ag - The Silver Searcher - even faster than ack

Viewers

• SumatraPDF - lightweight PDF viewer

Documentation

• Zim - Organize notes, saves to plain text
• Greenshot - Screenshots, including obfuscation / comments, for documentation, connects to JIRA
• yEd - multi-platform (Win/Linux/MacOS) graph editor, extensible palette, useful pictograms
• Paint.NET - free image editor
• GIMP - Swiss army knife for images

System

• Process Explorer - better task manager
• Autoruns - manage automatically started programs
• Rapid Environment Editor - environment variables editor

Disk Usage

• RidNacs - graphical du
• WinDirStat - even more colorful graphical du
• ncdu - CLI, can be installed from Cygwin/Babun

Keyboard

• WinCompose - a (X.org/X11 like) compose key for Windows - type äöë߀«»←↑↓→¡☺♥… like a boss!
• SharpKeys - remap keyboard: CapsLock → Ctrl, ~ → Esc, etc.
• AutoHotkey - very sophisticated keyboard macros / automation - full-fledged scripting language

Clipboard

• PureText - remove formatting from pasted text
• Ditto - clipboard manager

Pictures (taken from Twitter):