shrayasr/win-dev-env.md

## win-dev-env.md

      
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              win-dev-env.md
            
          
    Setting up my development environment on windows

So, I recently switched jobs and moved from SAP to Logic Soft Pvt. Ltd.
We here @ Logic Soft build applications on the windows platform. Which makes it
absolutely necessary for me to have a windows laptop.
Today, The Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series (5547) that I ordered came in. Really nice
piece of hardware. This document entails my journey in setting up a decently
functional development environment
My requirements from a dev environment are:

Unix-y environment with tools like sed, grep and the like
VIM
As less IDE as possible
Python
Emacs + MIT/Scheme for lisp programming

Decent shell and nix programs

Babun

I decided to try out babun. The interface looks
decent and it comes with its own mini version of cygwin so I thought it made
sense. Download and installation takes a decent while. Agreeable since it is
installing parts of cygwin itself. Once the installation was done, I opened it
up and the first thing I do whenever I am at any terminal is to clone
my and when I did that it worked. Next
I had to clone down the vim bundles. I use pathogen as my plugin manager
and so I manage my bundles with git submodules. When I tried to clone the via
https, BOOM. Multiple "library" errors. On a new system, library errors isn't
excusable.
End Result: UNINSTALL!
GOW

Next, I found GOW or Gnu fOr Windows. It looked
pretty decent and really small, so I went ahead and installed it. For all the
tools that it provided, the size was pretty nice. Tested a few utils with the
commandline and they all seemed fine.
End Result: KEEP!
Msysgit

The next thing that is absolutely necessary for me is git. I manage all my
code with git and so Msysgit is the natural choice. The thing is, along with git
you get a git bash shell. It really does the job of giving you a decent unix-y
shell. I've written quite a few shell programs in my previous company and put it
to daily use. Never really seen a problem.
End Result: DOH!
Python

Installing python on Windows can really be a pain. There are "packages" that
are provided by some people that would make this installation a bit easier. So
I decided to give them a try
Miniconda

MiniConda is from the same guys that made Anaconda. It packages python with their
own "conda" package manager. Everything seemed ok BUT for one thing - Conda doesn't
support the requirements.txt file that pip supports. This was a HUGE thing for
me since most of the open source world works on pip with the requirements.txt
file
Activepython

Activepython is from ActiveState. That too had the same problem as MiniConda -
Their own package manager, PyPm. No point. Goodbye.
Good ol' python

Then I wanted to figure out how one sets up python properly on a Windows system.
There were a couple
of blog posts that I read
to do with this and this is what I ended up doing:

Install Python from python.org
Put Python in Path: ;c:\python27\;c:\python27\scripts;c:\python27\tools\scripts
Download ez_setup.py
and install it with python ez_setup.py. This will give us easy_install.
We need easy_install to install pip. Ironical, but pip is well maintained
compared to easy_install. Install pip with easy install by doing pip install easy_install
Set up VirtualEnv with pip by doing pip install virtualenv

Grab a Beer!. Python installation on Windows is complete