It’s been over five years since I last posted on my Windows based developer environment. As I’m in the process of migrating over to a new Windows workstation, I thought I’d document what I’m using.

Thinkpad X1 Extreme

Great machine - love the 16 inch screen, but the fan is always running. I followed this guide here to change the power options to reduce the CPU power somewhat in order to reduce the constant fan noise.

I also swapped the bindings of the Function key and the Control key in BIOS.

Windows 10 Enterprise

A few basic steps right off the bat:

  1. Move the task bar to be on left side of screen instead of on bottom, you always have more space horizontally.
  2. Disable all the extra nonsense on the toolbar (news, weather, etc).
  3. Install powertools for the horizontal window split and snap.

Windows Terminal version 1.19

I removed the Ctrl-v binding in terminal to not conflict with vim’s default Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode.

Virtual Box version 7.0.14 and Vagrant 2.4.1

  • running Windows 2019, 2022, and Rocky 8 VMs
  • disabled all HyperV features in windows: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=110285
    • did not make any bios changes as performance seemed fine after OS level change
    • note that on new computer windows VM still shows “Acceleration: Nested Paging, Hyper-V Paravirtualization” and on my current computer it says “Acceleration: VT-X/AMD-V, Nested Paging”

SSH key on the Windows host and forwarded to all linux hosts with X11 forwarding enabled for clipboard sharing between guests and host.

VcXsrv version 1.20.0.1

NOT the most recent version at the time of writing, the most recent version wasn’t working

OpenSSH 9.5

running the OpenSSH Authentication Agent as a service with automatic delayed startup mode

cat C:\Users\<user>\.ssh\config

Host util
  HostName util
  User vagrant
  ForwardAgent yes
  ForwardX11 yes
  ForwardX11Trusted yes

Vim 9.1

cat C:\Users\<user>\_vimrc

set backspace=indent,eol,start
set clipboard+=unnamed  " use the clipboards of vim and win
set paste               " Paste from a windows or from vim
set go+=a               " Visual selection automatically copied to the clipboard

I want to make Vim opened in Windows Terminal as my default editor, I haven’t figured that out yet… Run vim.exe not gvim.exe, gvim.exe scaling is messed up.