Windows 11 developer annoyances
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!