PowerToys VS Windows Terminal

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo

RunFlow is a cross-platform productivity tool which can launch apps and search files and more, that similar to Wox and PowerToys on Windows, and also similar like Alfred and Raycast on macOS. But we have differences with these tools, and we have our own unique new features. Right now, at the below, we will introduce you what features of RunFlow have been implemented in more details. It's an amazing journey, let's start.

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.

This is great work btw.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...

Thank you all for the informative advices. Here is the summary for those who are in the same situation:

1. Run Windows on Linux by using VM

for the applications you can’t run on Linux

Risks:

* some softwares may attempt to detect VMs and refuse running

* Anything what needs to touch hardware may not work.

2. separate "data" partition on D:

3. back up %APPDATA% and %USERPROFILE%

4. learn chocolatey, scoop or winget

Winget should be good enough

5. Don’t worry about C:\Program Files

6. (Mixed) Use/Don’t use Ansible (or saltstack/salt)

Use:

* Allows you to setup a new machine quickly and consistently when one breaks, get stolen, or lost in an inconvenient time.

* You can get a clean and consistent development environment so that you do not depend on anything accidentally installed on the machine.

* If you define specialised roles, create test playbooks for those individual roles, use these roles to compose more complex playbooks, and offload logic to custom ansible modules that are written in python, you won't wrestle with heavy logic in the template or playbook layer.

* installing software and pulling some configs and scripts down is fine

Don’t use:

* You will spend your days fighting a mix of yaml and Jinja.

* You will end up looking at Python errors because there are no static types.

* errors are cryptic.

7. Use WSL2

You need 32gb of ram, but ram is cheap so choose a good thinkpad

8. Debloat with Recommended Tweaks

Run

irm christitus.com/win | iex

from Administrator Terminal (Powershell)

The link leads to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/mai...

VirusTotal

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/709834b0e003b6bb546cf16e...

9. Get [PowerToys](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys)

10. Use Devbox for containered environment

https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

11. Dual-Booting Linux and Windows

If you use physically separated drives, you don’t need partitioning.

12. Dedicated Windows machine for class

Yes it sure would be the cleanest solution but I prefer one device for everything

13. keep a git repository with all dot files in it

Many people suggested me to use virtualization, otherwise just let Windows be Windows.

Also, backing up seems to be a good practice.

I’m planning to write a blog about this, if it worked.

Again, thank you all for the helps!

Powertoys Run (https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys) can do this. There are not that many plugins as Alfred but Window Switcher is built-in.

For sharing a mouse/keyboard between Windows PCs, there is Mouse Without Borders. It's included in PowerToys nowadays.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

- https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

If you’re on Windows, download PowerToys. It’s an app published by Microsoft officially. Then enable Quick Accent in the settings of PowerToys. Now all you have to do is hold down the key you want accented until the switch shows up, then add an accent with your arrow keys.

microsoft/PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity (github.com)

> convince management of the value

This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point.

Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

"Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version."

More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server.

They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo.

I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

GitHub

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400

Assume its related to this:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

It's nothing serious just microsoft engineers writing slow as shit code and reacting poorly to someone trying to help.

"There are plenty of offline scenarios where this would be incredibly useful. For disconnected environments, etc. There are some environments that will never connect to winget."

Source: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440#disc...