@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.

@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) :)