dotfiles/windows

Windows Setup

• Turn off hibernation

  • Open admin cmd prompt: powercfg.exe /hibernate off

• Install Windows Defender

• Enable clear text

• Setup a symbol server:

  • Right-click My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environment Variables
  • Add a new System Variable called _NT_SYMBOL_PATH
  • Set the value to SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols, replacing the first path to where you want the symbols to live.

• Configure crash dump storage location for projects via the registry.

Enable security updates

If you don't have an antivirus program, or you do but it's not verified by Microsoft, then you will not receive security updates unless you set a key in the registry. Note that Windows Defender counts as a valid antivirus program.

Add the following registry key: Key="HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\QualityCompat" Value="cadca5fe-87d3-4b96-b7fb-a231484277cc" Type="REG_DWORD” Data="0x00000000”

Disable Win 7 Fault Tolerant Heap

Might be in Win 10+ too?

• I don't see why you want to spend large amounts of CPU time to hide application instability.
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Win7AppQual/fault-tolerant-heap
  • Disable on system via regedit: set the REG_DWORD value HKLM\Software\Microsoft\FTH\Enabled to 0.

Setup up Unix-like Shell

• Install MSYS2 w/ MinGW-w64 to C:\msys64

  • Open C:\msys64\mingw64.exe
  • Run pacman -Syu, then restart the terminal and run pacman -Su.
  • Run pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain git bc
  • Use C:\Users\<user> as the terminal $HOME by editting C:\msys64\etc\nsswitch.conf and changing the db_home value to windows.

• You may need to work around an issue with envsubst.exe - you'll know there's a bug if git displays not a valid identifier line 89: export: dashless or rebase complains about new_count.

  • To patch, cd into /mingw64/bin and run mv envsubst.exe envsubst.exe_backup. Now run pacman -S gettext and verify that which envsubst reports back /usr/bin/envsubst.
  • Bug report is at https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/735

• Map caps to left-ctrl using https://sharpkeys.codeplex.com/

• Use symlink command cmd //c 'mklink .name-of-dotfile drive:\path\to\file'.

• Symlink ~/.private-files to the root directory containing dev/.

• Symlink ~/.dev to ~/.private-files/path/to/dev.

• Symlink ~/.dotfiles to ~/.dev/path/to/dotfiles.

• Create ~/bin.

• Symlink $HOME/bin/sym to $HOME/.dotfiles/windows/symbolic-link.sh. You can now use this to do symlinks.

• Symlink files in the dotfiles windows folder.

• Symlink appropriate files in the root dotfiles directory.

  • Ignore all zsh files.
  • Don't symlink .vim folder because Plugged will fail to install the plugins. Just make a copy.

• Setup private dotfiles. Once done, you should now have ~/bin and ~/.dotfiles/bin in your path.

Configure Private dotfiles

• The most important task is to setup the c-dev-x64 shortcut for launching a msys shell with appropriate dev environment.
  • Add this to your taskbar and use this for launching a shell.

Setting up dev tools

• Download the Windows 2003 Resource Kit in order to get tools like list.exe (command line hex editor)
  • URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657
  • Installer will display a compatibility warning. Ignore it.
  • Full list of tools can be found here https://www.technlg.net/windows/download-windows-resource-kit-tools/

Setting up Visual Studio

• Use the backed up VS2015 ISO.
• Pick a custom install directory, e.g. /x/programs/Visual Studio 15
• Make sure to not do a default install. You must select the C++ language support.
• Edit visual studio options. Open Debugging -> Symbols and add the path to your cached symbols.

Setting up Vim

Compiling on Windows (optional)

• Open the shell with C:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -- If you don't do this then vim will not compile.
• Run pacman -S --needed base-devel msys2-devel gawk perl python2 python3 ruby libiconv ncurses-devel libcrypt-devel
• Clone MSYS2 packages: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages
• cd into the vim package
• Edit PKGBUILD and change the version number to the one you want to build. You can see the available versions at https://github.com/vim/vim
• Run makepkg
• If checksums fail then generate new ones: makepkg -g -f -p PKGBUILD, copy the output, edit PKGBUILD and replace the checksums array with the new values.
  • Run makepkg again
  • If it fails to apply a patch then you'll need to make the fixes yourself:
    • Clone vim (https://github.com/vim/vim), cd into vim/src.
    • Modify the file(s) that they failed patch was changing and make the correct fixes.
    • Commit the change.
    • Generate a patch file with git diff commitid1 commitid2 > newpatch.patch
    • Copy the patch to MSYS2-packages/vim and use the same name as the original patch that failed.
    • Regen the pkg checksums and add them to PKGBUILD.
    • Run makepkg again.
• Once built, install it with pacman -U ${package-name}*.pkg.tar.xz

Configuring

1. Open Vim and run :PlugInstall to fetch all plugins.
2. Create tmp folder for swap files. See set directory and set backupdir paths in vimrc.

Setting up Custom Search

• First install Rusto. See Setting up Rust below.
• Setup ripgrep:
  • Open an msvc x64 shell and run cargo install ripgrep.
  • Verify it works by running rg in a shell.

Setting up ctags

• Install the latest Universal ctags build: https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags-win32/releases
• Place it in ~/bin.

Setting up Cygwin

• Can create symlinks to dotfiles using the git bash shell. The cygwin home directory is likely going to be C:\cygwin\home\<username>.
• Build rlwrap

Setting up Rust

• Install rustup: https://win.rustup.rs/

Setting up Go

• Installer: https://golang.org/doc/install

Setting up Clojure

• Install Lein: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein.bat

Setting up Xbox stuff

• Install the xbox controller drivers
• Turn off stats collection
  • cmd-r, msconfig.exe, startup tab, uncheck Microsoft Xbox 360 Accessories.

Turn off various startup processes

• cmd-r -> msconfig.exe -> startup tab

Software

• Install Desktop Restore (http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http://midiox.com/desktoprestore.htm)
• Install Android platform tools to get adb.exe:
  • Download Android commandline tools https://developer.android.com/studio/#downloads
  • Unzip to some location.
  • Inside the sdk dir, run $ tools/bin/sdkmanager.bat platform-tools.
  • You can now add the platform-tools dir to your path if you want, or just symlink adb to ~/bin.

Youtube-DL

• In order to combine audio and video files you need ffmpeg. Download from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ and place the exe's in ~/bin.

Firefox

• If you see jaggy fonts then about about:config and check the value of gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode. Mine was -1 by default. Setting it to 5 removed the bad font rendering.