Spring Cleaning

Cleaning House

It’s spring and for some reason, that means I should clean things. I’m not really sure of why that is, but I decided to give it a try this year and wiped my Surface. I’ve wiped computers before, both intentionally and not, but not usually my main machine. Using macOS, wiping and re-installing can be a bit of a pain. Windows 10 makes this surprisingly easy: there’s a button for it in settings.

Click a few buttons, wait a little while, then start setting up what is essentially a new machine. I managed to get it done in about a few hours. Most of that time was spent finding and installing all the software I need.

And it’s pretty great so far. I’ve gotten rid of so much junk and only downloaded what I actually need to get by on. Sure, I’ll download more stuff as I go, but for now I have a lean, quick system. I’m definitely going to make this a yearly thing.

Moving into the Subsystem

One of the new things I decided to try after reinstalling was to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (a.k.a. Bash for Windows) more. I don’t have a lot of projects outside of work, so using it for all my personal work should, in-theory, be easy. Mostly, it means getting the Hexo CLI running so I can work on this blog.

Since you are reading this, I have clearly succeeded.

Node and NPM install easily and Hexo runs well from Bash. Plus I can configure Visual Studio Code to use Bash instead of the Windows Command Prompt which greatly eases the transition. It feels nice to be back to using a *nix style command line. It is one of the big things I miss from macOS.

One quirk with Hexo: I can use the serve command (hexo serve or hexo s) and then open the site in Edge just fine, but I cannot use the open flag (-o) and have it open Edge for me. I actually think that this could happen, but would require Hexo to implement some changes, so I don’t expect it anytime soon.

Something to note is that I did previously try to get Hexo running in Bash before, but due to some missing APIs in the WSL, it didn’t work. The Creators Update fixed this. I’m loving the frequent Windows updates that actually contain good changes.