Spring Cleaning

Cleaning up and trying new things.

Cleaning House

It鈥檚 spring and for some reason, that means I should clean things. I鈥檓 not really sure of why that is, but I decided to give it a try this year and wiped my Surface. I鈥檝e 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 pretty great so far. I鈥檝e gotten rid of so much junk and only downloaded what I actually need to get by on. Sure, I鈥檒l download more stuff as I go, but for now I have a lean, quick system. I鈥檓 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鈥檛 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鈥檛 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鈥檛 work. The Creators Update fixed this. I鈥檓 loving the frequent Windows updates that actually contain good changes.