win2k - Ultimate Dev Setup for Windows 🪟🪄

Do you find the Windows dev environment lacking? Do you miss your precious CLI tools on Windows?

Well I felt the same way too. That’s why I combined a package manager, a powerful CLI editor, tiling window management and lots of other tools in a easy to set up solution.

Introducing win2k

win2k screenshot

win2k is a set of handcrafted configs for setting up a complete dev environment on Windows.

It makes developing on Windows much more pleasant for CLI lovers.

✨ Features

  • Can set up a complete dev environment within minutes
  • Full featured CLI dev environment on Windows (natively, without WSL!)
  • Powerful personalized editing with nvim2k
  • Shiny and extensible prompt with oh-my-posh and Posh2K
  • Modern and intuitive keybindings for Windows Terminal inspired by tmux-tilit
  • Tiling window management with komorebi and AutoHotKey
  • Statusbar support with yasb
  • More!!

Setup

⚡ Requirements

  • Powershell >= 7 (recommended), Most features should work on Powershell 1.0
  • scoop — for package management
  • Meslo Nerd Font — Recommended font for glyphs support
  • Git with SSH setup — for cloning submodules, you can easily do this with the GitHub CLI by running gh auth login and selecting SSH as protocol.

🚀 Installation

# Install scoop
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser # Optional: Needed to run a remote script the first time
irm get.scoop.sh | iex

# Install git if you haven't already
scoop install git

git clone https://github.com/2kabhishek/win2k
cd win2k

.\setup.ps1

This will install all necessary packages, modules and setup symlinks for you.

💻 Usage

Tiling

Tiling is disabled by default as AutoHotKey keybindings are somewhat buggy.

But if you want to use Tiling Window Manager without keybindings:

Run StartTiling/StopTiling on a Powershell prompt to control tiling.

I recommend using PowerTools to add some keybindings, for example:

  • Win + q for closing current window

Status Bar

You can use yasb to show a status bar, similar to polybar. Follow instructions on yasb to set up.

My yasb configs are here

Extra Fonts

If you want to try out other fonts, you can also use oh-my-posh to install fonts

Just run oh-my-posh font install and select the font of your choice.

More Tools

I have intentionally kept the default list of packages to bare essentials.

If you want any other tools you can install them with scoop or winget.

# Install VS Code
scoop install code
# Install winget
scoop install winget

You can also search for packages using scoop search name.

Other Configs

For most tools I’m symlinking configs over from my main Dotfiles.

You can do the same or plugin your own.

Behind The Code

🌈 Inspiration

I find working on Windows somewhat unpleasant, WSL although tries and fixes it, but it felt constrained.

That’s why I decided to set up a dev environment using native windows tooling.

💡 Challenges/Learnings

  • The main challenge was to figure out all the pieces of this puzzle and solving it.
  • Learned a lot about Powershell and did quite some scripting with it.
  • Learned more about the Windows ecosystem, different environment variables, configs etc.
  • Had lots of fun!

🧰 Tooling

  • Dotfiles — Dev Environment
  • nvim2k — Personalized Editor
  • Powershell
  • Windows Terminal

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