thiagosfsilva / windev_setup

My personal and opinionated guide on how to set up a data analysis and development environment on Windows.

Setting up a geospatial / data analysis / development environment on Windows

0) Enable dark mode

No, seriously, it looks so much better and gives you a lot less eye strain. Right click on your desktop, choose Personalize and then on the Colors tab, select Dark under Choose your color. Boom, now you're a dev.

1) Install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store

If you're serious about data science and/or development, you can't stay away from the terminal forever. Not having a decent terminal was a Windows drawback for years, but now we finally have a pretyy decent one! Just head to the Microsoft Store and search for Windows Terminal. You can install the regular version, or the Preview version if you want to be at the bleeding edge. Just maker sure it is the offcial one made by Microsoft, there is a lot of crap there trying to trick people.

2) Install Chocolatey and/or WinGet for package management

The second major limitation of Windows against Linux and Macs was the lack of a package management system. Every Linux distribution has one (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.), and Mac has had the unnoifical HomeBrew package manager for years. Chocolatey is the equivalent of Homebrew for Windows, and recently Microsoft has phagocited Winget, making it the "official" Windows package manager. I currenlty use both but prefer Chocolatey as it is older and more stable, and because of the controversial back history of Winget.

Follow the instructions to install here. An administrative shell means you open Windows Powershell as administrator. Chocolatey is a command line (i.e. terminal based) application, but there is also a graphical user interface (GUI). I've never used the GUI, but conveniently, you can install it using choco itself.

Once you have choco installed, you can search for a particular program in the terminal by typing choco search nameofprogram. You can then install is with choco install nameofprogram. You can then update a single program by using choco upgrade nameofprogram , or update all programs installed by Chocolatey with a simple choco upgrade all. Oh glory!

Except for searching, these operations need adminstrator priviledges too, which brings us to…

3) Install gsudo

Have you ever seen Linux and Mac users throwing sudo jokes around and felt left out? Worry not! Sudo, which means super user do is the equivalent of Run as Admnistrator, but it works from the terminal, and only applies to the specific command that is appended to:

It is extremely convenient, because you don't need to remember to start your terminal in admin mode, then do what you need to do, and then close it because you don't to do everything as admin (unnecessary security risk). Install it using choco install gsudo (this is the last time you' ll have to explcitly open your terminal as administrator) and rejoice. From now on, every time you need to do something that requires admin privileges, you can just type sudo before the actual command. It will still open a Windows UAC window for you to accept, because well, it's Windows...but already a lot better than right-clicking.

4) Install some key basic apps

Other key apps you will need to develop on windows are a good text editor and a good IDE. My suggestion is to use Notepad++ for text and Visual Studio Code for IDE. Yes, technically they are both text editors, and both can be used as IDEs, but in practice I find Npp (as Notepad ++ is charmingly referred to) to excel at zero-delay opening and editing simple text files, while VSCode will give you all the bells and whistles of a full IDE (via extensions). I specially like that Npp adds a context menu entry, so you can open any file in it with a right click + choose Edit with Notepad++.... And I mean ANY file.

I also recommend installing 7-zip, to me it is the best file compression/extraction tool for Windows, and it will decompress anything you throw at it. Some people swear by PeaZip instead.

Finally install Git. If you are serious about becoming a data analystor developer, version control is a requirement, and pretty much everyone uses Git for that. No, Git is not the same thing as GitHub (we' ll ge there).

You can install them all using...choco! sudo choco install 7zip vscode notepadplusplus git and Bob's you're uncle.

5) Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)

For the longest time there has been a debate about Windows vs Mac vs Linux as the main OS to use, but in my experience it ends up like this: Windows users migrate to Linux, then spend the rest of their lives cursing the lack of compatiblity/ perfect replacements for MS Office, Adobe Suite, and other specialized software. Many will give up and go back to Windows after a while, especially if they like games. Mac users will usually be die hard fans and stay on Apple, and try to make do with the Mac shell, iTerm, etc.

For the longest time, the best solution for this was either to dual-boot, or to run the second OS as a virtual machine. And then Microsoft came up with something that was a mixture of both: the windows subsystem for linux, or WSL (technically now WSL2). It is faster and lighter than a virtual machine, but still runs "inside" Windows, so you don't need to restart your PC everytime you want to switch. Once Windows 11 matures, it is expected that you may even be able to run applications with graphical interfaces, but for now it is still for command line apps only. There are many reasons to use WSL, but to me the main one is that it will enable us to use Docker (see below) and for once get rid of the "but it runs on my machine!" issues.

Microsft has a very clear guide on how to activate WSL2.