After having to re-install Windows a few times too many in the past year (don't ask), so I decided to write up my setup and link to useful things I use, partially for myself, partially if anyone else finds it useful. I am not affiliated with, nor paid by any of the below. Several of these tools and methods I dive deeper into as they give a more unix like feel and are great for developers.
Make sure to read the install.ps1!
First off, I use chocolatey, it is quite possibly the best tool I have on this list. Package managers are awesome. It makes things so much nicer. Use it! https://chocolatey.org/
Clink gives really nice tab completion for command prompt and powershell. I install it through chocolatey.
To make it even better, I have used the wonderful clink-completions repo to add nice completions for many programs.
I decided I want my own style of prompt, so I replace git_prompt.lua with my
own (less intrusive) git-prompt.lua, which can be found in this repo.
I want to have remote access to my desktop at times over ZeroTier. When you
install the openssh package through Chocolatey, make sure to use the -params '"/SSHServerFeature"' flag so that you can get the ssh server running.
(source for more about the openssh package)
I work on Python projects like mypy. For this,
I need both Python 3 and Python 2. To acheive this, I use the python3 and
python2 packages from chocolatey.
I customize these installs by passing -ia "ADDLOCAL=Tools" for Python 2 and
-ia "CompileAll=1 Include_debug=1 Include_symbols=1" for Python 3.
The Python 3.X flags are documented here: https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#installing-without-ui while the Python 2.7 flags are somewhat documented here: https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.4/msi/ (I sadly couldn't find a better source for the 2.x installer sadly)
- SSH
- GPG