dotfiles/windows

Windows Setup

• Turn off hibernation

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

• Install Windows Defender

• Disable the WinSAT task which is used to figure out your Windows performance score. It eats up processor time and is generally useless.

  • Open task scheduler.
    • note If you see an error about a selected task {0} no longer existing then you'll need to repair the task scheduler. See https://www.thewindowsclub.com/the-selected-task-0-no-longer-exists-error-in-task-scheduler
  • Go to Local -> Microsoft -> Maintenance and disable the WinSAT task.

• 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 this may no longer be an issue

  • 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”

Windows 7 Stuff

• Enable clear text
• Disable Win 7 Fault Tolerant Heap
  • 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/

• Setup git completions for bash:

  • curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o ~/.git-completion.bash

• 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/bin/symbolic-link. 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 or download it from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=615448&clcid=0x409
• Pick a custom install directory, e.g. /x/programs/Visual Studio 15
• Select a custom install and check off the C++ language support.
• Once installed, open Visual Studio and go to Tools -> Options. Open Debugging -> Symbols and add the path to the cached symbols directory that you set up above under Setup a symbol server.

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 tree: pacman -S tree

• 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.