Here's all the stuff I use for C++ dev on Windows. I promise I'm not smug or anything, I just think using normal text editors with a console is familiar and comfy.

TDM-GCC (GCC compiler for Windows but Less Bad)

Whenever I installed Mingw, Msys or whatever, it either sucked or didn't work or both. This one right here ^ was just the most pain-free experience I've had for a ton of reasons!

Get it: TDM-GCC (sauceforge)

CMDER

Used By Jonathan Blow Himself, CMDER is literally just the command prompt but Not Awful. Everyone loves this.

Get this bad boy at cmder.net

"You Shouldn't Still Be Using Sublime Text" oof

Sublime Text slaps, but so do all basic text editors as long as they're just what you're comfortable with. I just happened to start with Sublime, and I'm faster with this than anything else* I've ever picked up. If you take the time to learn all of the neat shortcuts, it's surprisingly powerful.

* well uhhhhh "anything else" being emacs, vim and practically every electron editor. If you use Atom or VSCode that's cool and I don't really care about what you prefer but I just think they suck

Both my color scheme and theme are (a minorly edited version of) Predawn! It's neat and nicely spaced, without being too "material."

Anyway, here are the 2 plugins I use:

EasyClangComplete (with "show_errors": false because oof)

I really like autocompletion, it's the main reason I've used IDEs rather than anything faster. But think, "damn, does this feature really call for that much of a slowdown?"

It doesn't! Well, you have to install LLVM but it's still a lightweight editor with like, the 1 good feature of IDEs. It reads from the include directories you've defined in the package settings or from header files you've included.

The Repeat Command (C-u) from Emacs but for Sublime

Get Sublime-nRepeat, or, install it from the Sublime Package Mananger (Ctrl+shift+P, "Package Control: Install Package").

It can repeat any command or entered characters. This was one thing I'd miss from Emacs so I'm glad it's a dope plugin now. It's the best thing that I've ever installed. I just love it.

Usage: Alt+R <number> <command/char>

Makefiles..?

Mini-section, I just want to say... I just use Makefiles. I can't think of anything else to put here. I just think they're really intuitive. Like, CMake configs makes no sense to me. It's so much easier to think of things in terms of just, automating the commands you have to run to compile something. Learning to use makefiles is barely a couple steps beyond learning to compile by typing commands by hand. Familiarity is key to speed and intuition, yknow?

And, that's it!

I'm new to making stuff on Windows. Before all this, I was on Arch using CLion. Now that I'm sick of things being so slow and garbage on my bad PC, I switched it up, and now it's comfier than ever.

Hope this helps 🌸