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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I also love coding on Linux, but there are shortcomings. Not enough to make me prefer Windows, but enough to make me wish for something better.

Generally, Windows has better GUI-based tools. The big one being debuggers, I really miss debugging in Visual Studio (C++). But more generally, Windows tends to have a better selection of IDEs, database editors, version control GUIs, etc...

I love command lines and text editors, maybe that's the reason why I prefer Linux, but sometimes, GUIs are useful.

I don't know how the experience on OSX is. It never struck me as a particularly developer friendly platform but I may be wrong. It has a proper Unix shell, so it shouldn't be that bad.

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OSX is still miles behind windows when it comes to debugging.

I dislike windows with a passion (having had to code on it for ~5 years was torture), but I'm with you: debugging with Visual Studio was the best I've ever had (and I've coded on OSX, Windows, Linux, and other stranger things).

And yet Visual Studio is weak against Delphi and both weak against Visual FoxPro.

No mainstream debugger today is good with visualization of data structures (still you see 0xf... everywhere) and much less if have more than 10 entries.

With Fox I was able to debug the whole database visually!

Use the right tool, SQL Server Management Studio.

Oh,

Fox is not like a half-crippled* rdbms of late. The "database" is the whole program! (forms, menus, the database itself, etc)

* in the sense that RDBMS are relegated to data storage, when in the case of fox was open to make full apps

I used to do a couple of xBase apps during 1991 - 1994.

Visual Studio Code has an excellent visual debugger for Go. I'm certain it's the same experience for C/C++.

Does it have edit and continue?

I use Visual Studio in Windows with WSL2 to get the best of both worlds. I have the GUI niceness of Visual Studio combined with the shell goodness of Linux.

I am neither a C++ developer nor a Windows user but as an IntelliJ user just wondering if you have tried CLion?

Not the OP, but having used both Visual Studio and CLion, Visual Studio is far ahead. For one thing, Visual Studio includes a better front end for code completion (EDG front end) and is able to handle complicated c++ constructs much better than CLion. The debugger also has some more refinement. In addition, Visual Studio has a built in profiler that is very simple to use. I would say that CLion is more comparable to Visual Studio Code with the C++ plug-in than full Visual Studio.

macOS (or OS X) appeared quite developer-friendly to me. Xcode had a nice debugger that worked locally as well as remotely on a phone. Also you could use the IDE and commandline tools that were fairly well integrated.

CLion is great for C++ on all the platforms

If Windows is a good GUI, how do I reliably swap caps lock and control?

Assuming you really want to know, try SharpKeys.

https://sharpkeys.en.softonic.com/ looks so scammy, and I have ublock turned on... I can only imagine how it must look without that. I'm sure it's fine but why do all windows tool s always get hosted on the most scam looking websites?

When I'm stuck on windows I use https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctrl...

Of course adding setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps to ~/.xinitrc seems way easier to me. But I'm probably in the minority.

That Softonic site is probably totally unrelated to the original developer. This is the legit site: https://www.randyrants.com/software/

It's also on GitHub: https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

That is way better. Annoying that it wasn't in the first few search results for me.

AutoHotkey seems to work for me

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys has reliable key remapping. Also has decent window tiling.

Swapping left control and caps lock disturbs AltGr, which appears to be a synthesis of left control and right alt.

I see what you mean. I truthfully don't usually swap and instead leave ctrl-left as is and just re-assign capslock elsewhere (e.g. win-right, or another chord) as the habit of which key to hit for ctrl is hard for me to break. AltGr at least still works in this setup.

Ah. I just left the physical control key alone, and thus have no caps lock key at all. Seems some applications grab the keypresses at a lower level than where PowerToys changes it, so sometimes caps lock is activated when my intention is to hold control.

Was screensharing with a react native hotshot yesterday, and felt my perceived age doubled to 102 as I suddenly was yelling in all caps, with no quick exit.

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