GitExtensions VS Vagrant

I agree that git is almost asking you to juggle commits.

My preference is to use temporary branches and cherry-picking instead of stashing; I mostly use a gui* to work with git so it is easy to select the two or three commits to cherry-picking or see visually if an interactive rebase would work.

* https://gitextensions.github.io/

I use Git Extensions myself as I find the git interface very straight forward, however they still have this fucking insane and frustrating issue: In the mergetool "Theirs" and "Mine" are swapped

Git Extensions is a more-intuitive way to manage your Git repositories in Windows. Its standalone interface serves as an effective, CLI-free means to control Git. Preferred by namtab00, because "SourceTree hides and shortcuts too much git functionality."

I presume this is where one goes to make a feature request? https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/issues

If you're on Windows, I'd start with installing official Git. It comes with a Git Bash CLI and what not. There are also third party apps like GitExtensions and TortoiseGit if you want more UI/shell integration.

Everyone's going to downvote this, but I prefer the GUI over the command-line. I use http://gitextensions.github.io/

https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/releases/tag/v2.51.05 - nice little ui for working with git. unfortunately, v2.51.05 is the last version that I can confirm works under mono (it was the last 2.x version and they completely rewrote the code from scratch in the 3.x series. My understanding was that it lost Linux compatibility at that point).

on the off chance one hasn't been tracking it, there were several "we don't need your stinking BuSL" projects when this drama first started:

https://github.com/opentofu#why-opentofu (Terraform)

https://github.com/openbao/openbao#readme (Vault)

and I know of several attempts at Vagrant <https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/forks> but I don't believe one of them has caught traction yet

There are also some who have talked about an "open Nomad" but since I don't play in that space I can't speak to it

It sounds like you're using Nix as a sort of configuration management solution. CM just isn't worth it for managing a single desktop IMO. It triples the effort for whenever you need to add or remove a package, as you must now add that also to your nix configuration. You're supposed to be able to make that back up in time saved restoring to the next machine, but inevitably the next machine will be different enough that you'll have to edit it all anyway. In the end I just got tired of trying to manage my own machine with infrastructure as code (though in fairness I was using puppet at the time not nix).

I keep a git repository with all my dot files in it[1]. This seems to work the best. It has a Windows folder as well, and I copy that out whenever I need to set up Windows.

A lot of people like using WSL but I hate how it hogs on my memory. Hyper-V is a terrible virtualization engine for consumer-grade use cases because it can't thin provision RAM. If I need to use docker, I will spin up a small Linux VM using vagrant[3] with Virtualbox[4] and put Docker on there. Vagrant is an extremely underrated tool in my opinion, particularly in a Windows context.

I use scoop for packages. Typically I will scoop install msys2 and then pin it so that it doesn't get blown away by the next upgrade.

Then I basically do all of my development inside of msys2. I can get most things running in there without virtualization. In my case that means sbcl and roswell for common lisp, senpai for irc, and tmux and nvim for sanity. Msys2 uses the pacman package manager and this is good enough.

All In all, I set up my Windows machine affresh after a while of not using it and it took me about 3 hours. Most of that time was just getting through upgrades though, I felt like it was pretty fast.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~skin/dotfiles

2: https://www.msys2.org/

3: https://www.vagrantup.com/

4: https://www.virtualbox.org/

Tools like Docker and Vagrant can be used to allow local environments to mimic production environments.

There's an open issue [1]. A scripting interface has since been added [2], and updated [3], so there's progress.

[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518

Someone should fork and maintain Vagrant with an MPL open source license:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/CHANGELOG.m... ?

The changelog lists both improvements and bug fixes and there's even apparently some effort to port it away from ruby: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/internal/cl...

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If you want an all around easy to use tool that can manager containers (create on the fly, delete when unnecessary, etc.) look into vagrant. There are also options like xen and virtualbox but they are not so lightweight. All of them are in ubuntu repositories.