Things I like to set up on a new Windows PC
27 Jan 2021
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:
- The Java SE JDK (not just JRE)
- The Salesforce CLI tool
- 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.