5 Tools To Boost Your Productivity on Windows 10
Tags: misc
Published: 2020-10-29 23:48:27

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title: 5 Tools To Boost Your Productivity on Windows 10
published: true
date: 2020-10-21 10:51:40 UTC
tags: Misc
canonical_url: https://coderscat.com/5-tools-to-boost-your-productivity-on-windows-10
---

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<img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1440/1*Q-iBP4G7fa27mf2ZAPxduQ.jpeg" alt="" width="1440" height="1079" data-image-id="1*Q-iBP4G7fa27mf2ZAPxduQ.jpeg" data-width="1567" data-height="1175" data-is-featured="true"><p>@stadsa on Unsplash</p>
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<p>Microsoft has done great efforts to improve the user experience and build an active ecosystem for developers. Moreover, Microsoft has completely embraced open source in recent years, there are so many<a href="https://opensource.microsoft.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-href="https://opensource.microsoft.com/"> awesome open-source projects</a> developed by Microsoft.</p>
<p>After 8 years of daily work on a Mac, I recently moved to Windows 10. My previous impression was that Windows is not developer-friendly and efficiently compared with Mac.</p>
<p>But my latest result is that I don’t miss my Mac, I may get some shiny development experience on Windows 10. Within two weeks of exploration, I found the following 5 tools can greatly improve my productivity.</p>
<h3>PowerToy</h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-href="https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys">PowerToy </a>is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity, it’s open-source! There is a total of 8 small utilities in PowerToy, explore them by yourself!</p>
<p>To improve productivity, I suggest these two ones:</p>
<h4>PowerToy Run</h4>
<p><a href="https://aka.ms/PowerToysOverview_PowerToysRun" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-href="https://aka.ms/PowerToysOverview_PowerToysRun">PowerToy run</a> is a similar tool as Alfred or Spotlight on Mac, with a simple Alt+Space, it helps you search any applications, processes, files, URLs, etc. Anything you can imagine. It runs a simple calculation if you like:</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*wBzYGovrEbTd0UjF.gif" data-image-id="0*wBzYGovrEbTd0UjF.gif" data-width="1867" data-height="884"></p>
<p>Alt + Num (1, 2, 3, etc) will maximize or minimize the active window according to the inputted number.</p>
<h4>Keyboard Manager</h4>
<p>Keyboard Manager is a tool for remapping keys. As an Emacs user, I need to swap Caps Lock with Ctrl, because Ctrl is used more frequently and Caps Lock is located at a more proper position on Keyboard.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*IzvPr74ZoabzFVU1.gif" data-image-id="0*IzvPr74ZoabzFVU1.gif" data-width="1376" data-height="1102"></p>
<p>You could also do key remap in some specific applications, but remember it will only accept process-names not application names, so for Microsoft Edge that would be “msedge” but not Microsoft Edge. To get the process-names, you may use the command <em>tasklist and Select-String </em>for pattern matching in Powershell:</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/1*pOiqjM1ZWFxRHcnkriRbPA.png" data-image-id="1*pOiqjM1ZWFxRHcnkriRbPA.png" data-width="698" data-height="151"></p>
<h3>WSL2</h3>
<p>As a developer, we need to run some Linux shell commands for daily work. On Mac, we have a Unix-like shell which is enough for daily usage.</p>
<p>On Windows, WSL is a game changer! Forget those Mac and Linux nuances, we need a pure Linux Kernel and Shell.</p>
<p>WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL2 is the latest version and has a better performance. We could even run docker in it.</p>
<p>There are very<a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10"> detailed tutorials</a> on the official documentation page. Precompiled Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, and Kali. If we want to run a Linux GUI application,<a href="https://github.com/hubisan/emacs-wsl#run-emacs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-href="https://github.com/hubisan/emacs-wsl#run-emacs"> config it with X-Server</a>, and everything goes well.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*dOjxN06LJrscj3Do.png" data-image-id="0*dOjxN06LJrscj3Do.png" data-width="1672" data-height="935"></p>
<p>Use the path <em>\\wsl$\Ubuntu</em> to access the files in Linux.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/1*wakP9vexyyicckOXKu6fzw.png" data-image-id="1*wakP9vexyyicckOXKu6fzw.png" data-width="947" data-height="424"></p>
<h3>Windows Terminal</h3>
<p>The new Windows Terminal is another gift, it has a fancy UI and awesome performance. We could use it to create PowerShell, Command Prompt, and Linux in WSL!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/1*SDTk7jYJKiZ75aT58exONw.png" data-image-id="1*SDTk7jYJKiZ75aT58exONw.png" data-width="874" data-height="557"></p>
<p>Great performance comes from a GPU accelerated text rendering engine. From my actual experience, it’s almost 2X faster than Iterm2 on Mac.</p>
<p>Even more, we can display almost anything we want there, icons or emojis.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*ChDK3Mc_GpMIUzqN" data-image-id="0*ChDK3Mc_GpMIUzqN" data-width="2260" data-height="1358"></p>
<h3>Visual Studio Code with Remote WSL</h3>
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<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1440/1*-qCM8-NyeqdjSAUOX3wJZQ.png" data-image-id="1*-qCM8-NyeqdjSAUOX3wJZQ.png" data-width="2560" data-height="1402"></p>
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<p>VS Code has tons of excellent plugins, it’s could be configured into a powerful IDE for most programming languages. With the plugin of Remote-WSL, we could edit the files in Linux, so we get all the productivity of Windows while developing with Linux-based tools, runtimes, and utilities.</p>
<p>Edit source code in the editor window, and run or compile it in the embedded Shell Terminal. This is almost the same user experience as Emacs, I can not want anything more!</p>
<h3>Zeal</h3>
<p>When I begin programming, Dash is the tool I’m missing. Luckily, we have an alternative tool on Windows.</p>
<p>Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software developers and combined with 200+ docsets. Actually, most of them come from Dash.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/960/0*LpiRgBjZXG6_tfs7.png" data-image-id="0*LpiRgBjZXG6_tfs7.png" data-width="886" data-height="515"></p>
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<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>With these powerful tools, we will get a lightweight, mixed, programming environment. If you don’t have to develop Mac/iPhone applications, Windows 10 will be the right choice.</p>
<p>Hope you enjoy it, and happy coding on Windows!</p>
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