Okay guys, this is it!

Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.

So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)

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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?

1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.

2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.

3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁

4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!

5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.

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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?

1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...

2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/

3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...

4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/

5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...

6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/

7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...

9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/

10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...

Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?

1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/

4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/

5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/

8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/

That's it, folks.

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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.

But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?

Remember /dev/rant for devrant (https://devrant.com/rants/1569303) ? :)

Here's the first version of it: https://gitlab.com/netikras/... . read-only, with some hacks.

Oh, and if anyone needs a pure-shell library for json -- feel free to use it :) Bear in mind it might still be buggy.