To the coders: How to Windows?

Off-Topic
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Hi there,

I am a long time Linux user and coder, both for fun and for work. I am used to command line based workflows. And everything emacs.

Now introduce Windows 8, which I am using mostly for music. I just installed it at the beginning of the year. And now there comes the urge to make some lua tools for renoise or just some python scripts for something or maybe start a simple vsti or this or that or whatever.

But I cannot wrap my head around setting all the tools up, use proper version control etc.

On Linux, I get everything I need from the repos or just browse them for fun and find new tools. I use Linux for everything except music. I also used it for music for years, I just wanted to try something different.
On Windows, I am just overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things for software development, that do the same, and I do not know which one to get, which one to use, I am just lost.

Mots of the time, I’ll just use cygwin for the small stuff, but there has to be a clever and Windows native set up, doesn’t it?

I am willing to learn here and expand my knowledge, so, guys, how do you develop software on a Windows box?

Thanks for your thoughts! Chris

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Regarding programming in Lua I am mostly using the Renoise native “Scripting Terminal and Editor”.
There is also a distribution “Lua for Windows” which includes all necessary libraries and an editor (Scite) including debugger, which is quite something “out of the box”.

What else languages do you like to program?

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Hmmm…that must be very helpful.

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For development there are plenty of IDE’s many of them available also on Linux. Jetbrains has collection of excellent IDE’s. Those can be used for Lua development as well as for many other languages. Basically they have their “flagship” IDE: IntelliJ IDEA. This has most features and supports most languages and tools. And there are bunch of other ones, which are basically subsets of IntelliJ for specific development: PhpStorm for PHP development, PyCharm for python, RubyMine for ruby development, etc. Not sure if all of them support Lua, but I know at least PhpStorm and IntelliJ have Lua plugin.

As for VSTs you probably want to write them in C/C++. Most people seem to use Microsoft Visual Studio to do C development. But there are of course many alternatives, including open source ones. You can also create VSTs with different languages or even with tools that doesn’t require programming, like SynthEdit.

As for Version Control, I recommend using git. It works exactly the same as in Linux, and you can use command line interface for it. For graphical use, there is TortoiseGit, SourceTree and most, if not all, IDE’s come with built in git functionality.

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One of the alternatives, available with or without MinGW compiler: