I'm a bit late to the game, but here is my response to this Tweet from Vicky Harp.
Tell me about the things that annoy you when writing code on Windows. Anything goes. Dependencies, performance, documentation, tooling, coding, building, searching, whatever. In an IDE, in a terminal, in a notebook, in a VM, wherever.
What tasks do you find fiddly or annoying?
— Vicky Harp (@vickyharp) December 7, 2022
Running Windows 11 Professional with WSL2 the things I come across include:
- WSL2 sometimes becoming unresponsive with the only resolution being one or two reboots
- It's great that the Microsoft Store can update apps in the background. But sometimes it does this with Terminal, and you lose important running processes or the results of a long-running process
- Difficulty in exposing WSL2 Docker services to someone other than your local machine. The IP address of the WSL2 instance keeps moving
- If you have a folder open in File Explorer with a lot of changes happening, such as many temporary files being created and removed, then your selection will keep disappearing. This causes me issues when trying to rename a file or folder while there is other activity in that folder. I will actively be renaming a file/folder, only to have File Explorer abort the change and refresh everything
- Related, if OneDrive is syncing files and you're trying to perform a rename, often files that are syncing will appear to reorder, often going to the bottom of the list. This causes File Explorer to refresh cancelling your active rename
- Windows Defender scanning can slow down processes. On Windows, PHPStorm tries to work around this by excluding itself from scanning.
- It would be awesome to be able to reposition the cursor in Terminal by using your mouse pointer. Just imagine you need to re-run a command and press the up arrow to bring up the last command. But now you need to edit it, and the change is 100 characters from the start. That is a lot of scrolling!
- How to Simplify Docker Compose Files With YAML Anchors and Extensions
- Installation Using Docker on Production Server
- XLite is a tool to query Excel (.xlsx, .xls) and Open Document spreadsheets (.ods) as SQLite virtual tables. See the discussion on Hacker News
- From 204 requests per second to 480 with a single configuration change details how to tweak a PHP-FPM set up using
pm.staticandPHP OP Cache - OCRmyPDF can be used to add an OCR text layer to scanned PDF file. See the discussion on Hacker News where there is mention of [NAPS2] (https://www.naps2.com/), a Windows tool to scan and generate OCR'd PDFs
- DevToys is a Swiss Army knife for developers. It includes so many tools developers would use strange websites to do including JSON and SQL formatting, base64 encoding/decoding, and much much more. It is available from GitHub as well as the Microsoft Store
- Excel has a
Get Data from the Webfeature that can be used to import data such as tables. See https://twitter.com/asmith83/status/1549373680496656385 - Toggl is a time tracking tool
- AWS open sourced the AWS console design system using React components. https://cloudscape.design/
- The Good Car Company provide affordable Electric Vehicles in Australia by importing from abroad
- Managing Persistence for Docker Containers
- While reading about the discussion over Retool I found out about a similar open-source system called Budibase which looks like it could be really handy
- https://emysound.com/ uses the Audio/Video fingerprinting and recognition in .NET library
- ICMP, Ping, and Traceroute - What I Wish I Was Taught
- See the Windows HEVC video codec from Microsoft costs $0.99 discussion on how to get the HEVC codec for free from the Microsoft Store.
- Composer Generator can be used to generate Docker Compose configurations on the fly as well as modify existing configurations
- LocalStack is a fully functional local cloud stack emulating AWS services. This allows you to develop and test your cloud and serverless apps offline.
- Why I built a dictionary app, with a discussion over on Hacker News. It turns out that Wordnote has been open sourced. There is also mention of NotificationDictionary for Android with the ability to look up a word from any app supporting text selection.
ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
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built a quick app that uses gpt-3 to convert from English to RegEx so you don't have to waste time on stackoverflow: https://www.autoregex.xyz/ pic.twitter.com/PjaKY2glCo
— aarya (@gd3kr) July 8, 2022 -
CTRL + Shift + A to search your open browser tabs is the GOAT
— Jen Gentleman 🌺 (@JenMsft) July 15, 2022 -
TIL: https://github.com/username/.keys Provides that username's public key(s) configured on GitHub.I was wondering how Ubuntu / cloud-init could load your authorized_keys with only a public username. Pretty cool! pic.twitter.com/q8qgKklNdX
— Jim Angel (@JimmAngel) August 4, 2022 - More information is available from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16158158/what-is-the-public-url-for-the-github-public-keys/16158737#16158737
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Ever wished you got notified when an app is added to your Startup Apps list in Settings? That's a thing you can enable in Windows 11 😊 pic.twitter.com/wGqBDTSBjL
— Jen Gentleman 🌺 (@JenMsft) August 8, 2022 - This can be done by going to
System -> Notificationsand enablingStartup App Notification
- Android Basics in Kotlin course
- Android Basics with Compose course
- Architecture MAD Skills series wrap up
- Now in Android - a new, open source, real-world sample app, with the source over here. It's written in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose
- How to Create a Perfect Repository Using Kotlin Exclusive Features
- Take your first steps with C#
- Apple Maps on the Web along with MapKit JS
- Windows Auto Dark Mode is an open source third-party app to automatically switch into light and dark mode. I wonder when Windows will natively support this. I did use it, but switched away as some apps didn't respond to the changes too well. No fault of this utility though.
- Latitude and Longitude Finder
- Execute command in timed intervals describes using the Linux
watchcommand to run something on a regularly timed interval. Useful when you're developing something and don't want to set up a cron job. - Take the pain out of git conflict resolution: use diff3
You can use Windows Sandbox to install non-Store Windows software you want to try without it mucking up your regular system. I use it to periodically backup all my iCloud Photos with iCloud for Windows that I really don't want all the time. https://t.co/Q3tWjUKlcY
— Hayden Barnes (@unixterminal) April 12, 2022 - Windows Sandbox Tutorial – How to Enable Sandbox On Windows
- Windows Sandbox configuration
- Symfony Console Component - Tips & Tricks
- 30 Days of PWA - Learning Series about Progressive Web Apps
- CI Pipelines for dockerized PHP Apps with Github & Gitlab
- asciinema - Record and share your terminal sessions, the simple way
- GetHuman: Details how to bypass phone menus and get through to an advisor
- Webhook.site lets you easily inspect, test and automate (with the visual Custom Actions builder , or WebhookScript ) any incoming HTTP request or e-mail.
- Microsoft Editor is a spelling and grammar checker plugin for Chrome and Edge
- Containerizing a Symfony application
- Docker - Supervisor config for (PHP) workers
- localhost.direct allows you to set up your localhost with HTTPS (SSL) and sub-domain support
- My (free) Django monitoring stack for 2022 lists free services you can use to improve the monitoring and uptime of your site
- NIST Password Standards
- A Proper Server Naming Scheme has some ideas on how to go about naming your servers
- HWiNFO is a Windows app to display detailed information about your system. Includes data such as CPU temperatures
- Desk stretches to ease aches and pains
- Microsoft PWA-driven Widgets Explainer
- Docker Registry contains information about hosting your own registry using the open source Docker Registry
Today I lerned about the .env file in Docker compose. And the ${VARIABLE:?err} notation for triggering an error on missing environment variables will be helpful too.👏
— Richard Spindler (@oracle2025) June 11, 2022 - Wicked Blocks - 120+ Free Tailwind Components contains over 120 fully responsive component and blocks you can copy paste into your Tailwind projects
4. Make PrintScreen take a snip Ever wished that PrintScreen did the same thing as WIN + Shift + S? Just enable this setting, and if you press PrintScreen it will now prompt you for what region of the screen you'd like to copy to your clipboard pic.twitter.com/iHGSym03ZA
— Jen Gentleman 🌺 (@JenMsft) May 15, 2022 - Build your first Power Automate for desktop flow
- PHP Cron Scheduler
- SchedulerBundle is a Symfony bundle built to schedule/consume repetitive tasks
- Build mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI
- Simply Static is a Wordpress plugin to generate a static site
- Markdoc is a Markdown system designed at Stripe to power their documentation
- Traefik Proxy 2.x and Docker 101
- Mitmproxy2swagger allows you to automagically reverse-engineer REST APIs. See the discussion over on Hacker News.
- You can create a great looking website while sucking at design, along with the discussion over at Hacker News.
- Dead Man's Snitch allows you to monitor your cron jobs to ensure that they are indeed running. See the discussion over on Hacker News where they mention https://healthchecks.io/, https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma, and https://torsion.org/borgmatic/.
- How to Simplify Docker Compose Files With YAML Anchors and Extensions
- Storing Business Hours in a Database
- Stoplight Studio is a cross-platform GUI application for creating OpenAPI specifications. I have been using it for creating an API for a personal project, and it seems to work well.
- Using PostgreSQL I had a need to Return pre-UPDATE column values using SQL only and learned about the
RETURNINGkeyword. I have implemented this in my codebase and reliably get back the pre-updated values. In my instance I was wanting to return the original price of an entry I had just updated. - I am trying out Git Credential Manager in Windows and WSL2. I have set it up, but have not yet had a need to use it.
- AWS Vault is a tool to securely store and access AWS credentials in a development environment. I do not currently use AWS services, but this would likely be useful at the day job.
- James Seconde had a talk at PHP UK Conference 2022 entitled "From Betamax to VCR: harden your API integration testing." in which he talks about using PHP-VCR to record and playback API queries. This is a PHP implementation of the popular Ruby VCR library.
- I watched the Postman Beginner's Course - API Testing course which taught me a very useful tricks about Postman. Who knew it had an entire testing system built into it? The initial few chapters are quite basic, but I was very interested in the "Introduction to Test Automation" chapter. This led me to Newman the cli companion for Postman.
- How to Troubleshoot Any Problem has some excellent tips, especially to slow down and ask for help
- Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon
- U34P2C 34" WQHD Monitor with IPS and KVM
- DSM 7 - Plex Media Server - Release Info & Migration instructions
- myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox: Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS
- Feeling hot and bothered? It’s not the humidity, it’s the dew point
It seems that the last time I listed links was back in 2013, so it's time to resurrect this. At least this way I can manage to keep my Instapaper list manageable.
- @JenMsft lists her favourite Windows hotkeys. I certainly learned a good bit such as clicking on an icon while holding down Ctrl & Shift launches it in elevated mode.
- @partytimeHXLNT details how to switch off text suggestions in VSCode. It's "Editor > Suggest: Show words"
- On Windows you can
| clipto send output to the clipboard. @unixterminal points out that you can use| clip.exevia WSL to do the same thing. - FalsiScan can make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned
- Build your first WinUI 3 app using the Windows App SDK - part 1, 2, and 3
- Docker + WordPress Setup details how to set up and use WordPress from within Docker
- @tonysmdev had a tip on how you can override some form's attributes from a button with things like
button[formaction],button[formmethod], and more. Originally sourced from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/button#attr-formaction - The post on Obscure HTML Tags taught me a few things such as the details tag. A good few things there that might mean you no longer need a framework for some of it.
- Advanced settings configuration in WSL using
wsl.conf(Distribution specific in WSL1 and WSL2) and.wslconfig(WSL2 Global) - Configuring SSH access into WSL 1 and WSL 2
- @crepels has developed a playground for systemd over at https://systemd-by-example.com/. The announcement blog post is at https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/systemd-by-example-the-playground/.
- If you're using a Lenovo laptop then you'll be used to using Lenovo Vantage to install BIOS and driver updates. @unixterminal noticed that the enterprise version is far less spammy. https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/hf003321
- @joel__lord has a tip about using
git switch.
TIL about
git switch.🤯Ever did a bunch of changes in a codebase, only to realize that you're working on
master?
git switch -c <new_branch>Creates a new branch and brings you local changes over.
- Sharing SSH keys between Windows and WSL 2
- PHP in 2022 details what is now possible using PHP 8.1 including enums and read-only properties
- Using Traefik to Route HTTP Requests to Multiple Docker Microservices
- Monitorian is a Windows monitor control app using the Display Data Channel/Command Interface Standard (DDC/CI).
- ngrok allows you to provide external access to localhost services such as a dev instance of your app
- How to Create a Markdown Blog in PHP With the Slim Framework using interesting things like
DirectoryIteratorandFilterIterator. - Finding or Recovering your WSL Data details how to recover your WSL2 instance after performing a System Reset. A useful tip is that the ext4 VHDX file is stored in a subfolder of
%LocalAppData%\Packages\such asAppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState - I initially found out about Tailscale via their How our free plan stays free blog post. They apparently offer a secure network that just works using a zero config VPN.
- Appwrite is a self-hosted alternative to Google Firebase
- Fastmail JMAP backup using Python