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Things I like to set up on a new Windows PC

27 Jan 2021
💬 EN

Table of Contents

A work-in-progress post reminding me of some things I do on new Windows computers.

Git

I install Git for Windows.

I make sure to let it install Git Bash and put that software into my right-click context menu, because it’s worth its weight in gold.

I used to install Sourcetree and set it up, but for a lot of things that I blindly add --all commit push, I’m pretty happy with VSCode’s sidebar as a Git UI.

PowerShell

I make sure PowerShell is reasonably up-to-date.

Firefox & Chrome

I install Firefox & Chrome. I lock one browser down tight with respect to cookies, auto-clearing history, etc. I leave another as the “dirty” browser for testing things that don’t work so well with the settings locked down tight.

Python & Pandas

Windows Store has been pretty decent so far.

Only thing is, I think I may have kind of messed up my PATH or something when I tried to side-by-side install 2.7 for node-gyp intercompatibility. Not a huge deal, but I have to manually switch the Python interpreter now in VSCode to run as Python 3.

Visual Studio Code

I install VSCode.

Some extensions that have proven fun in the past are:

  • Ascii Tree Generator (if blogging about things that involve folders full of files)
  • Bracket Pair Colorizer
  • es6-string-html (if doing web development)
  • Git Graph
  • Peacock (if developing similar ideas across multiple subtle variations)
  • Placeholder Images (if doing web development)
  • Prettier
  • Python (from Microsoft)
  • Shell launcher (if doing web development – it’s nice to be able to pull up Git Bash inside VSCode for a moment)
  • vscode-faker (if doing web development)

And if I’m doing Salesforce development, I need:

  1. The Java SE JDK (not just JRE)
  2. The Salesforce CLI tool
  3. The “Salesforce Extensions” plugin package for VSCode

Plus I have to log into a couple of Salesforce orgs and download their metadata to meaningful folder structures on the hard drive. But before I do that, if I’m tracking the contents of those folders with Git and want continuity with old “remote” tracking history for those orgs, I need to git clone files from those backups into folder structures on my hard drive. And then instead of starting fresh with VSCode, I need to work my VSCode setup into my existing Git-tracked folder structure, like I did when I migrated from Eclipse to VSCode.

I also set up some Peacock themes for Salesforce org folders almost right away, since it’s so easy to get mixed up about what org’s codebase I’m working on.

NPM / Node

See Team Treehouse, PhoenixNAP, StackOverflow, and if doing web development w/ packages involving node-gyp, Atomic Object.

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