Working on Windows seems to be impossible for many developers I know. They are either macOS or some GNU/Linux users. Most of the time I don’t ask anyone, because, you know. Recently I needed to work on a Windows machine, because a customer required us to use some very special VPN client which is available for Windows only. So I needed to adapt to work on Windows and I discovered it really sucked less than I remembered.

Built-in ssh

This is what really struck me, I launched a cmd terminal and out of habit I typed ssh somemachine -l atruemper. When pressing enter it flashed through my mind ‘Darn, it’s Windows, dude, stupid…’. But a verify host key prompt appeared. It is now built in to Windows, so you don’t need to install Putty or somethin. That is also true for scp, ssh-keygen and others.

Long Path / Filename

If you develop on windows, you may have seen errors due to too long path/filenames. Since Windows 10/1607 there is a solution built in. You just need to set a registry key to 1, thats it. Link

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem LongPathsEnabled (Type: REG_DWORD)

If you have enabled this setting, you should reboot. After rebooting, git still needs to be convinced to enable long filenames as well:

git config --system core.longpaths true

Now the limit is 4096 chars, which is a git limit.