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Setting up my windows dev environment
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win-dev-env.md

Setting up my development environment on windows

So, I recently switched jobs and moved from SAP to Logic Soft Pvt. Ltd. We here @ Logic Soft build applications on the windows platform. Which makes it absolutely necessary for me to have a windows laptop.

Today, The Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series (5547) that I ordered came in. Really nice piece of hardware. This document entails my journey in setting up a decently functional development environment

My requirements from a dev environment are:

  • Unix-y environment with tools like sed, grep and the like
  • VIM
  • As less IDE as possible
  • Python
  • Emacs + MIT/Scheme for lisp programming

Decent shell and nix programs

Babun

I decided to try out babun. The interface looks decent and it comes with its own mini version of cygwin so I thought it made sense. Download and installation takes a decent while. Agreeable since it is installing parts of cygwin itself. Once the installation was done, I opened it up and the first thing I do whenever I am at any terminal is to clone my and when I did that it worked. Next I had to clone down the vim bundles. I use pathogen as my plugin manager and so I manage my bundles with git submodules. When I tried to clone the via https, BOOM. Multiple "library" errors. On a new system, library errors isn't excusable.

End Result: UNINSTALL!

GOW

Next, I found GOW or Gnu fOr Windows. It looked pretty decent and really small, so I went ahead and installed it. For all the tools that it provided, the size was pretty nice. Tested a few utils with the commandline and they all seemed fine.

End Result: KEEP!

Msysgit

The next thing that is absolutely necessary for me is git. I manage all my code with git and so Msysgit is the natural choice. The thing is, along with git you get a git bash shell. It really does the job of giving you a decent unix-y shell. I've written quite a few shell programs in my previous company and put it to daily use. Never really seen a problem.

End Result: DOH!

Python

Installing python on Windows can really be a pain. There are "packages" that are provided by some people that would make this installation a bit easier. So I decided to give them a try

Miniconda

MiniConda is from the same guys that made Anaconda. It packages python with their own "conda" package manager. Everything seemed ok BUT for one thing - Conda doesn't support the requirements.txt file that pip supports. This was a HUGE thing for me since most of the open source world works on pip with the requirements.txt file

Activepython

Activepython is from ActiveState. That too had the same problem as MiniConda - Their own package manager, PyPm. No point. Goodbye.

Good ol' python

Then I wanted to figure out how one sets up python properly on a Windows system. There were a couple of blog posts that I read to do with this and this is what I ended up doing:

  • Install Python from python.org
  • Put Python in Path: ;c:\python27\;c:\python27\scripts;c:\python27\tools\scripts
  • Download ez_setup.py and install it with python ez_setup.py. This will give us easy_install.
  • We need easy_install to install pip. Ironical, but pip is well maintained compared to easy_install. Install pip with easy install by doing pip install easy_install
  • Set up VirtualEnv with pip by doing pip install virtualenv

Grab a Beer!. Python installation on Windows is complete

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