Today I spent some time working on my dotfiles for Windows.

In the last year I switched to a full Linux environment and I have gotten quite used to my workflow there.

But now I have to switch to Windows again due to work.

Learnings of the day

• Powershell has execution policies

  • “RemoteSigned” should be reasonable for personal clients

  • Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

• The history command does not exist -> cat (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath

• Use of Invoke-Item $profile to quickly open the powershell config

• I would like to know who came up with the brilliant idea to put the personal powershell config at $HOME\Documents\PowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

• I really don’t like that there is no convention like ~/.config for Windows. Everyone puts configs where they feel like.

• Winget is a great package manager with pretty much all tools you need (so far)

  • winget install zig.zig fzf BurntSushi.ripgrep.MSVC

• Windows has security concerns with symbolic links -> need to be an administrator to create them. This sucks quite a bit.

• Dotbot can do more than creating symbolic links

  • We can ensure directory structures exist
  • We can directly execute shell commands
  • => We probably don’t need anything else aside from an install script that executes dotbot

• GlazeWM is very nice and allows me to have the same workflow on Windows as on Linux