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Comment by jonhmchan | Hacker News Reader

It's not really that bad. I'm running a parallels VM running Windows 8. The major difference between that and running a straight Windows environment is that we switch off from Vagrant (running a VM within a VM is pretty rough)

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That was my top question during my interview. I'm seriously amazed at how nice Parallels runs now a days (and on fast machines) though.

This might be a left over from my experience from older (slower) VMs, but I am curious why you went that route over Boot Camp. Looking at the stack it seems like you would spend almost all your time in Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio without much need for native OSX software. Why not get the speed boost of a non-virtualized environment in the OS you would be spending an overwhelming majority of your time in?

There are a few things in our stack like Elasticsearch and Redis that we specifically run on the Mac and simply have the VM point to the right ports. This basically requires that we have both running simultaneously.

However, going pure Windows on a Mac is not entirely a bad idea either. There's a mix of devs here that use Mac or Windows - it comes down to personal preference imo

On a newer Macbook Air, I can even game in a Windows 8 VM. They've come quite far, and with things like unity mode in VMWare Fusion (don't know what it's called in Parallels) you get your VMs applications like they are somewhat native OS X applications.

There isn't much of a speed penalty, and especially not in "simple" things like an IDE.

That's actually what I am doing (I'm an oddball, I prefer Apple hardware and Microsoft software). I have an iMac running windows 8.1 and an external Cinema Display. So far, everything works and runs great. I would suspect if I did anything graphically heavy, I would run into some problems though.

I'm wondering the same. Visual Studio can be quite demanding (especially with Demon installed and Resharper)

How you handle the different keyboard layouts? For me its always a pain to switch between coding on OSX/Windows because of the differences in copy/paste/selecting of text etc.

Parallels has gotten extremely good at handling this. Switching from Cmd -> Ctrl actually isn't an issue at all (you don't need to switch at all). It's really seamless - the only problem is having one window from OS X going over to the VM and vice-versa. In addition, some ports running weird when running Redis and Elasticsearch on the Mac but pointed to from the VM.

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