sane-windows-coding-setup.md

if you ever find yourself having to code on windows, here's some sane tooling to get a smooth experience

keyboard repeat rate

windows doesn't allow you to set the keyboard repeat rate nearly high enough, so we have to use keyrate

to set a fast repeat rate at boot:

• put keyrate.exe in C:
• win+r -> shell:startup
• create a .bat file

@echo off
C:\keyrate.exe 200 1

run it manually if you don't want to reboot

terminal emulator

the windows terminal and the legacy terminal are both ridiculously slow. we are going to use alacritty.

I also don't like using powershell or cmd so we are going to configure it to use bash.

• install msys2
• install alacritty
• install JetBrains Mono
• win+r -> notepad %APPDATA%\alacritty\alacritty.yml

paste the following and save:

shell:
  program: C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe
  args:
  - --login

font:
     size: 14
     normal:
          family: JetBrains Mono

conclusion

now you can run alacritty and it should start within the msys2 environment

from here you can also call windows software (for example: start explorer.exe) and put that in scripts as needed

you can access windows files from directories like /c/Users/

it's up to you to install your favorite editor and configure bash to your liking

using tcc

git clone https://github.com/Kochise/tinycc_win32
cd tinycc_win32/win32
./make-tcc.bat
echo 'PATH="~/tinycc_win32/win32:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

to test the compiler, create this example:

#include <windows.h>

int WinMain() {
  MessageBoxA(0, "hello", "hi", MB_OK);
}

compile and test:

tcc ./hello.c
./hello.exe

using msvc compiler from alacritty + msys2 (absolutely proprietary)

create a gen-vcvars.bat file with the following (adjust visual studio path if incorrect)

@echo off
REM credits: https://gist.github.com/vvuk/01dc8a12678d1beffaa1e26549d03b02

set OLDPATH=%PATH%
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64
SET "PATH=%CD%;%PATH%"

echo #!/bin/sh > vcvars.sh
echo export INCLUDE='%INCLUDE%' >> vcvars.sh
echo export LIB='%LIB%' >> vcvars.sh
echo export LIBPATH='%LIBPATH%' >> vcvars.sh

call set "NEWPATH=%%PATH:%OLDPATH%=%%"
set "NEWPATH=%NEWPATH:C:=/c%"
set "NEWPATH=%NEWPATH:\=/%"
set "NEWPATH=%NEWPATH:;=:%"

echo export PATH="%NEWPATH%:$PATH" >> vcvars.sh

this will generate a vcvars.sh that you can chmod and source:

./gen-vcvars.bat
chmod +x vcvars.sh
source ./vcvars.sh

now you should be able to run cl to compile stuff using msvc