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I had a USB that I carried around with me with a whole bunch of portable apps on it. That allowed me to have some kind of "standard environment" I could rely on.

I've since migrated to Linux 100% (outside of work) and whilst there are the odd annoyances, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to Windows. And I can have a good chuckle almost once a week these days with each new Windows consumer hostility coming across the HN front page.

You can do that (probably even better) on linux with a Live Usb. I have a fedora one on my keychain since it has firefox and libreoffice included by default

> the purity of "working with what's installed".

Oh, a kindred spirit!

I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.

(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)

> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?

Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.

Not having one’s configuration present is kneecapping yourself needlessly.

If you’re going to have a custom config, you might as well have a custom executable.

Oh but we have our configuration, it's all in the defaults baby. And what isn't like locking down /home/user permissions and increasing bash_history sizes, I keep it small and configurable in less than 2 minutes. (And server side only, which always requires more setup.

Not saying that spending the first days on a new project configuring your custom setup with the company's stack is bad, especially if you are categorizing as employee and are looking for a multi year long run. But I tend to do small contracts, 1 to 6 months, and starting right away is a nice boost.

> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain

Shh, please. If MS find out, they'll add a parrot to "improve" it.

I played with the preinstalled languages in windows before, but the legacy stuff dizzied me before llms existed.

now that llms exist I am learning with dotnet, that now comes with windows, (or at least it comes with winget, and you can install a lot of kosher software, which is almost as good as having it preinstalled.)

If I ever hop onto an older machine I'll use the gpt to see what I get, i recall there's vbscript, apparently a .net compiler+runtime, and I saw a js interpreter in very old OS too.

A big inspiration in this realm is FogBugz historical "Wasabi". Their idea of compiling to PHP and c# i think it was, because it's what most OS come with, and their corpo clients can use it as it. It's in a joel spolsky blog post somewhere.

There's still old tiny Metapad. And also more modern and fully featured (but still light) Notepad 2/3/4 and Notepad++. For full replacement, i just renamed all instances to notepad.exe.bak, back then on Windows 7 & 10, and rename-replaced it with metapad.exe. Though, i guess with UWP apps (modern Notepad is one), it's just file associations nowadays. There's surely some mass-reassociate utility around?

Btw, nano is only 50/50 chance that's it's pre-installed. Learn some vim, will ya? ;)

If he learns vim... gasp ...he will be cursed with having to install vim in every machine he touches for the rest of his life! :)

It usually comes with linux, but nano is simpler and it doesn't teach you by holding you hostage until you learn :q!

Does Windows come with a compiler I don't know about? Or do you only code batch files and VB Script?

> This has hurt me specifically. Since I work without IDEs, no VIM, no vs code. On linux I use nano, on windows I use Notepad. I like the minimalism and the fact that I have absolute control, and that I can work on any machine without needing to introduce an external install.

What's your day job? Are you self employed?

EDIT.COM still works in dosbox

Edit is ported to win11 and edit(.exe) should work in your shell of choice.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

But... did they add a http server in it? Mail reader?

no, and the person at Microsoft that wrote it is adamant about keeping it as an editor only.

Management: add "AI" or we'll fire you and give the project to one who will.

Rewrote it in Rust

That explains why it's so nice. Well, not really, but it does hint at it being new and built by someone who gives a damn. It's honestly far nicer for my use than vi or nano, which is annoying since I'm on Linux.

Edit: Fedora has it available as "msedit". What a time to be alive.

Except it keeps reverting to the new notepad every few days….

I’ve been fighting this for the last couple of weeks but it just doesn’t stick

Did you bring out the big guns? Regedit.exe