instal the new for windows Good to Great

Head to the Settings app, then “Update & Security” and click “For developers” in the bar on the left. Once you’re all set up, the first thing you want to do is enable Windows Developer mode. The update adds a lot of major improvements to Bash on Windows, most notably support for iNotify which allows file system watchers to work natively - an important requirement for me. The update should be generally available soon, but for now it’s better than the base release of Windows 10, and notably improves High-DPI displays for those using 4K monitors. Getting startedįirst up, make sure you have Windows 10 Creator’s Update installed - it takes a few minutes to enroll in the Insider Program, which lets you get free preview versions of Windows. If I can use the Windows desktop, play games, do day-to-day work and code in one place, I sure as hell want to… and Windows 10 is actually pretty damn nice, especially on great hardware. I could code on Linux, and certainly the Ubuntu desktop has come a long way from the old days, but dual-booting to Linux seems annoying to me, and I don’t want to have to configure two operating systems.

I can fire it up in Windows Explorer, too, because the file systems are shared. Just like a Mac or Linux box, I can type subl. No awkward file mounts or VM synchronization this is real Linux.Ī simple example of how good this is: if you install Sublime Text 3 in Windows, it'll be accessible in your bash terminal if it's in your path. I can use Visual Studio Code, on Windows, with a task runner like Webpack running under Ubuntu, monitoring for changes on the same filesystem. Here's why the Windows Linux Subsystem is so good: it's the best of both worlds. The only reason coding directly in Windows is suddenly so feasible is thanks to Microsoft’s work on the Windows Linux Subsystem, which gives you a fully-fledged Ubuntu install right at the command line - and it works surprisingly well. If you're interested in what hardware is worth using, I recommend the Surface Book 2 but have an ongoing series of laptop reviews here. How can you code in a nice way on Windows?Īs a result, I thought I’d share the setup I’ve made for my modern front-end development workflow on Windows, along with the quirks and benefits of coding on a platform like Windows 10.Last week I wrote about switching to Windows from Mac for good, and a number of people wrote in to me from one of two buckets:

Instal the new for windows Good to Great