Ugh. A fresh Windows 11 is so barren.

There are no useful tools installed and no easy package manager to get basics installed. Everything is "find app web page, find download link, download installer, install stuff, wonder what got installed and where, fiddle with PATH". It gets boring really quickly.

Not even a good Bash terminal... How can people develop like this?

@chakie Step 1 on a new windows 11 machine:
Install linux :D
@mbybee Unfortunately not an option if you want to compile a Windows binary of an app.

@chakie @mbybee first thing I do on a Windows machine is install scoop and then everything else via scoop: https://scoop.sh/

Also:

> Unfortunately not an option if you want to compile a Windows binary of an app.

You can get pretty far with Zig as C/C++ toolchain, for instance I can build exes using D3D11+DXGI+Win32+WASAPI on macOS or Linux. Testing and debugging such an exe isn't quite as trivial though.

A command-line installer for Windows

@floooh @mbybee I don’t think I’m prepared to mix in Zig into this mess, although I’ve heard a people praise it. Scoop is new to me, there has to be a lot these services around that provide packages to make developing on Windows at least not suck monkey balls.

@chakie @mbybee Scoop is more like a cmdline tools/application installer than a package manager - e.g. it's closer to Mac's homebrew than Linux package managers like apt or pacman.

For Windows there's also Chocolatey, and MS now also has their own tool (winget), but I tried them all and Scoop seems to be the most sensible.

@floooh @mbybee I'll try it out. Maybe it gives me everything in the same "environment". Like when using Git Bash I get Git and an nice Bash shell, but it's all in an own Unixy filesystem seemingly without access to C:/ and co.

Homebrew is something that should come preinstalled on macOS if we're being honest. Having to do that one download feels unnecessary to me.

@chakie @mbybee this is my essential list of scoop-installed tools:

busybox (UNIX cmdline tools)
fd (find files)
ripgrep (find in files)
git
cmake
ninja
python
vscode
cmder (better terminal window)

@floooh @mbybee A few new ones there. Seems like this will make my life in the Windows world a bit more bearable. :)

Still need to figure out how to actually get things to build from the command line. This OS is so user hostile...

@chakie @mbybee I think that's why cmake has won, it's about the only (meta-) build system with good Windows and MSVC support.

My condolences though if you need to get an autoconf+make build working on Windows (it's probably easier to port the build system to cmake) :)

@chakie @mbybee ...e.g. I don't think that Windows is 'developer hostile', it's just that it's not a UNIX system, and most of the UNIX world doesn't care about making their builds work on Windows (and vice versa).
@floooh @mbybee Oh god no, no autoconf this time. I did a similar port about 10 years ago and back then most dependencies used autoconf. It was not fun but I got it done after some gnashing of teeth.