After 4 years of using Mac in my workspace, I finally returned to the Windows environment. I know that current Windows is far more development-friendly, but so far as I know, I should use the Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) to access any *nix command. But that will take a lot more extra steps in enabling the WSL itself, downloading a Linux “Windows App”(I prefer the latest Ubuntu LTS), setting Remote WSL in VSCode, and so on.
With all of those hassles in Windows performance is becoming a cumbersome issue. One of the prime examples is when I invoked pip in WSL. For some reason, pip is looking up for the xServer which is not available in WSL by default. I really don’t want to use Windows native Python installer, but at this moment I need it. And also there are more *nix tools and commands other than just Python.
In Mac, there is a Homebrew package management system to install many things to Mac which is not available by default. The installation is also very simple and doesn’t need an elevated system privilege to do it. Windows environment also has something equivalent called Chocolatey. While very handy and support a large number of applications, it often asks for Windows confirmation each time I added something with the choco command. And then, I was surprised at the number of paths added by Chocolatey in the Windows environment variable after some time.
And then I discovered Scoop.
It seriously changed the way I use Windows as a development base. Scoop is like an almost perfect copy of Brew. And it provides anything I need to add to supercharge the Powershell or install much other software from it. And what makes me very happy is, unlike Chocolatey, it doesn’t mess up the path or the registry. Also, most of the apps provided are purely windows executables, downloaded directly from their repository release. Of course, there are some apps that still required a UAC popup and need to be installed like a normal app/software installation in Windows. But that really a small portion of it, and I think that’s okayish.