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Discussion on: Moving web development from Windows to Linux: Key tips?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Quick list of things that come to mind include:

  • ZSH: Bash is nice, ZSH is better in most respects if you're looking at doing interactive work from the console. Webdev on Linux will result in you using the console a whole lot more than you probably did on Windows, so having a good shell is a must.
  • A real webserver: such as nginx or h20. This is a lot easier to work with on Linux than it is on Windows, and gives you a better idea of how your app will behave than just serving it via Node's http-server module will.
  • elinks: This is a really advanced text-mode web browser. It's helpful to have one to test accessibility, and they're a lot nicer to use on Linux than Windows. Alternatives include Lynx (the most popular, but somewhat hard to learn to use) and w3m.
  • Inkscape: One of the most powerful SVG editors out there. If you do anything with vector graphics as part of your web development, Inkscape is a wonderful tool to have around. Also works on Windows too.
  • imagemagick: A CLI image editor, great for batch-processing images of all types. A lot of sites like to use it for server-side image conversion and similar, so you might already be a bit familiar with it. It's quite literally one of the most powerful general purpose image processing tools out there, and it's great for cases when you need to process a dozen images in exactly the same way.
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zflloyd profile image
ZF

Also if a11y testing for Windows users is something you have to do, setting up a windows VM with JAWS and NVDA (most used screen readers on Windows, JAWS is really present on mostly enterprise computers since NVDA is largely better) is the way to go.