Setting Up Development Environment on Windows

As a vehement and outspoken anti-Apple preacher for all things hardware and software related, I have been time and time again mocked or warned about the disadvantages of the development environment limitations of a windows-based machine. The main complaints and tribulations that I needed to address (for myself included) were - 

* Find a way to circumvent having to deal with windows command prompt/line syntax in favor of more familiar and comfortable unix console syntax

* Find a good package manager that can compete with the likes of brew or apt-get

The first conundrum was rather easily solved with the installation and activation of Git (with the process being virtually identical to any other platform) and using the the git shell instead of the windows command prompt. The git shell accepts all unix-like commands so you can feel right at home "cd"-ing and "ls"-ing around your file system. I have yet to try more complex bash scripts or commands, but for my current necessities this works like a charm.

Coincidentally, GitHub also helped me procure the next solution with the desire to install and use their code editor, Atom (which I will be presenting about tomorrow). The suggested method of download and installation for Windows 8 is to use a package manager called Chocolatey. This is now turning out to be a marvel of a package manager that also helped me install Node.js, Grunt, and Bower - all paramount to the Mozilla projects that I will be focusing on this semester.

Stay tuned for next week's updates.