<p>I’m currently rebuilding my main Windows machine after it had become close to unusable. Given that I upgraded it multiple times from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 11 without ever reinstalling the OS, this shouldn’t have come as a major surprise. Either way, this is the reason for the sudden outburst of Windows related posts so I can go and refer to my blog as my Internet Notes repository.</p>

<p>I’ve blogged about <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2014/03/12/improving-the-performance-of-git-for-windows/">improving the performance of Git on Windows</a> in the past and rightly labelled the suggested solution as a bad hack because it requires you to manually replace binaries that are part of the installation. For people who tend to use DVCSs from the command line, manually replacing binaries is unlikely to be a big deal but it’s clunky and should really be a wakeup…

<p>The Windows build of Emacs 24.5 doesn’t ship with SSL and TLS support out of the box. Normally that’s not that much of a problem until you are trying to access marmalade-repo or have <a href="https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog">org2blog</a> talk to your own blog via SSL/TLS.</p>

<p>In a <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2014/03/12/improving-the-performance-of-git-for-windows/" title="Improving the performance of Git for Windows">previous blog post</a> I explained how you can substantially improve the performance of git on Windows updating the underlying SSH implementation. This performance improvement is very worthwhile in a standard Unix-style git setup where access to the git repository is done using ssh as the transport layer. For a regular development…

<p>OK, I admit it - I’m a dinosaur. I still use the command line a lot as I’m subscribing to the belief that I can often type faster than I can move my hand off the keyboard to the mouse, click, and move my hand back. Plus, I grew up in an era when the command line was what you got when you turned on the computer, and Windows 2.0 or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager">GEM</a> was a big improvement.</p>

<p>It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation <em>my</em> developer workstation.</p>

<p>Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> - I prefer <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of <a href="http://msysgit.github.io/">Git for Windows</a> is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a…

<p>The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.</p>

<p>The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed <a href="http://git-scm.com/docs/git-p4">git-p4</a> to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had…

<p>I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial. A quick tweak of my global .hgrc provided me with…