A new co-op position meant new hardware¹, and a new technology stack to learn. Unfortunately, that includes having to use Windows. Coming back to Windows after almost 2 full years on Linux, it felt like I forgot how to use a computer. All the keyboard shortcuts that my hands were used to would do funny things like lock my laptop. I just wanted my shell, my terminal, and my tiling window manager back.

Note that this post is only about Windows alternatives for tools in my Linux workflow. I won’t be talking about tools that are specific to the job like IDEs and DB browsers (maybe in a separate post).

Going full Linux with WSL

I used WSL before I became a full-time Linux user. I had a positive experience with it, so my first instinct was to reach for that. I was disappointed with the performance, though, and the startup time is horrible. Not good if I want to be able to use the shell right away. Having a separate $HOME directory also made file organization awkward.

I figured that this was in no way going to be tolerable, so I knew I had to get cross-platform or Windows-native tools. It was time to give up my dream of having a single workflow everywhere.

Terminal Tools

Shell: Nushell (nu)

I use Nushell because… (?) I didn’t like Powershell²?? Now that I’m writing about it, there was no reason for me NOT to learn Powershell. The concept of piping objects instead of text is somewhat different, but Nushell uses that same concept (since it’s inspired by Powershell). If anything, Powershell is probably more polished since it’s built with Windows as a priority. I also had to spend time learning Nushell, anyway. My time would’ve been better spent learning the tools that are actually native to the system I’m using. I wasn’t giving up zsh on my Linux machines either, so Nushell being cross-platform doesn’t mean anything to me.

Directory navigation: lf -> zoxide

I used to use lf to change directories using an lfcd binding, but it’s a bit harder to integrate with Nushell since change in environment variables are scoped. I came across zoxide which is great for jumping around my most frequently visited directories. If I do need to explore a deep directory, I actually fire up lf, even if it takes around 1.5 seconds to start up.

Terminal Multiplexing: Nothing :(

I tried looking for a cross-platform platform alternative to tmux, probably something written in Go or Rust. One of them was zellij, but it doesn’t work on Windows. For simple terminal management, Windows Terminal works fine.

Neovim

I have also flipped my workflow around Neovim and terminals. Instead of having two or three tmux panes, I simply have Neovim open and use the terminal inside it using the :terminal command. By not using Neovim inside tmux, I can use the increment number (<C-a>) binding properly. I have also carried this in my Linux workflow which simplifies things by a lot. It could get annoying sometimes though when I accidentally quit Neovim as it also kills the shell sessions that I start inside it. VSCode also has this problem so I usually run development server processes in separate Windows Terminal tabs.

Window Management

I tried to get tiling windows using FancyZones from Microsoft PowerToys, but it felt laggy and it was quite a resource hog. I also didn’t have enough screen space for it to be useful, anyway. I eventually got used to pressing Alt + Tab and Alt + Shift + Tab to go back and forth between windows, which isn’t too bad. I have also carried this keyboard shortcut back to Pop! OS, although I still prefer moving between workspaces³.

Terminal Emulator

Windows Terminal, hands down. This is what I’ve used back when I used Windows 10. It’s customizable enough to keep me happy and the shortcut to start different shells in new tabs is really handy when I need an admin shell (no more searching for Powershell, and clicking ‘Run as Administrator’). It’s also the only terminal that I’ve used on Windows that actually sends mouse terminal sequences to programs. Even the VSCode integrated terminal doesn’t work properly with lazygit!

I also tried using Alacritty, which is what I use for the rest of my machines, but it doesn’t matter how fast the terminal emulator is if the programs themselves are slow. Not having the features of Windows terminal actually slows me down more.

Conclusion

When I first started using Windows again, it all felt so foreign to me. But with these alternatives to my workflow, there’s not much difference from when I’m working inside Linux. Maybe except for having Visual Studio running in the background for the back-end server. With cross-platform tools written in modern languages like Rust and Go, I can simply download the binary, plop it into PATH, and go crazy.