So I’ve stopped using my mac laptop to remote to the work-provided workstation sitting under my desk—mostly because the corporate proxy has become too painful to work around without using a domain-sanctioned machine on the LAN. Having grown into my poweruser self while mostly using *nix/Mac, this leaves a lot to be desired.

Here’s a list of things that make the experience a bit more uniform across platforms:

• Colibri: a somewhat adequate standin for Quicksilver
• GVim: the same damn editor on every damn platform. So very good.
• Cygwin: I haven’t gone much beyond the shell, but that’s the primary reason for grabbing it. Not the most intuitive thing to get running but worth the time. Powershell just doesn’t cut it.
• Spotify: Not a Mac-specific thing but having the same audio player on all platforms makes me fezzy.
• Firefox: for all the same reasons as Spotify. Besides, using the integrated sync function my history, bookmarks, and keywords follow me around. Also…I’ve been Firefox since it was Netscape 6 alpha releases. I’ve tried quitting for the new hotness several times but always come back. Must have add ons:
  • AdBlock: Because the WWW is so much nicer without the clutter.
  • FlashBlock: Autoplaying Flash is the second worst thing the WWW has ever sprung on us. Control when you see Flash content!
  • It’s All Text: HTML textbox elements can dump to a gvim buffer where you get all the vimmy goodness and then dump back to the HTML textbox with a simple :x
  • LastPass: The one password manager to rule them all. Go premium and you get it on your mobile device too.
• Thunderbird: Same mail client across all platforms is nice. Currently trying to set up a robust set of filters + well trained SpamAssassin to make webmail a useful alternative but until then, nice to have a client to do stuff for me.
• Console2: My crutch for when Cygwin proves difficult. A wrapper for the native cmd.exe that, with creative use of DOSKEY commands in the launch script can map okay with bash. It isn’t bash though.
• Virtual Box: The same VM tool across platforms is nice. VMware Fusion is hard to give up though.
• WinMerge: A decent diff/merge tool. Integrates nicely with TortoiseSVN. TortoiseSVN is one app with no useful analog in the mac universe and this always makes me sad.
• mRemote: Better than mstsc, not as good as Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac tool + Quicksilver. It serves two functions however: (1) saved connection information for dozens of servers (2) detachable tabs.
• Python: The world’s best scripting language. Period. YMMV.

All of this to say, I’m certain there are better Windows-specific tools for handling all of the above tasks. They are probably even more functional, hip, and speedy. These are the tools that have made my own transition to a Windows workstation smoother. Not only that, but I’m still keeping my Mac/*nix workstations outside of my job so uniformity in environment is key.

The primary reason for publishing this? I’m getting a new workstation in the next month or so at work and so want to inventory all of the crap I’m going to have to reinstall once the transition happens. The funny thing? The workstation they are replacing is more than adequate for my daily needs in every way except one—it isn’t portable. I sort of wish I could trade them my aging MacBook for the workstation under my desk. It would make a great *nix tower at home! I believe it is also Hackintosh-able.