[drop_cap]L[/drop_cap]ast year, I moved to CachyOS on my laptop. I expected a different Kernel. I was ready to do some things differently. What I didn’t expect was a total disruption of my workflow. Not just on that Linux machine, but across any other machine I would touch afterward.

Once you get familiar with Linux’s terminal-first approach and you’ve tasted the speed of a GPU-accelerated terminal and a shell that doesn’t fight you, going back to a standard Windows setup just feels … wrong.

But Windows doesn’t have to suck (at least not completely). You just have to stop using it the way Microsoft wants you to and start treating it like a workbench for the tools that actually matter.

The Heart: WezTerm

Most Windows terminals are ugly, slow, or render text like they’re struggling with a hangover. On my quest to recreate that “close to the metal” feeling on the old Redmond rig, I tried all the popular “terminal emulators” like Alacritty, Tabby, etc.

They all have their advantages, but WezTerm is my favorite so far, for the simple reason of superior font rendering. With WebGPU and Harfbuzz enabled, it’s the closest thing to Kitty on Windows. It’s Lua-configured, beautiful (TokyoNight for the win), and blazingly fast.

The Brain: Starship

Fish isn’t quite there on native Windows yet, so I use Starship on top of Git Bash. The default setup is a bit noisy with the colorful icons. I prefer it minimal. I don’t need my prompt to tell me my AWS billing or Python version every time I switch directories. I just need it to be fast and get out of the way.

The Tentacles: GCM + GitHub CLI

VS Code handles auth behind the scenes, which is fine until you realize you’ve become overly dependent on the GUI. That’s why I switched to the GitHub CLI paired with Git Credential Manager and Lazygit.

  1. Run gh auth login once.
  2. Let GCM handle the token vaulting in the Windows Credential Manager.
  3. Done. Push and pull across private repos without ever touching a browser tab or an SSH key again.
  4. If you ever get tired of typing git commands, just use Lazygit:

The Scratchpad: HeloWrite

I take a lot of notes while working on various projects. And by now I’ve become so accustomed to the terminal-first workflow on Linux that I ended up building a minimalist word processor (HeloWrite) where I can jot down notes in a distraction-free way, right inbetween two git commit and git push commands. It has become my favorite way of taking notes and yeeting them into my vault.

No need to reach for a mouse and “come up for air”. No VIM-style modal hell. Just open, write, save, push, and continue.

By now it has become second nature, and I’m writing this blogpost in HeloWrite in Wezterm on my Windows rig right now.

The LLM Orchestrator: OpenCode

I’m over the “AI Chat” era. I don’t want to copy-paste code into a browser or little chat window, which is why I mainly just the OpenCode TUI these days. It fits this whole workflow perfectly. It’s fast. It doesn’t have to filter through layers of Electron bloat. It actually “understands” the code via its LSP. The cool aesthetic of using cutting edge transformer tech in a retro-looking text interface is just the icing on the cake.

While other LLM-CLIs like ClaudeCode are great, they lock you into one vendor (Anthropic), so model selection is limited. OpenCode lets me swap between any vendor or model on the fly, no questions asked. Just earlier today, I used it to prune an Obsidian vault with thousands of notes and years of commit history.

It was glorious. After 5 minutes Sonnet 4.5 (via CoPilot in OpenCode) had devised, implemented and tested a streamlined auto-squash strategy with pre-commit hooks that “compress” my messy commits once per week. That’s precisely the kind of work LLMs excel at.

And sure, I could have done it myself, but it easily would have taken me more than 5 minutes. Honestly in 2026, if you still do this kind of stuff manually, you’re just a masochist. These days I just cd into a folder and let OpenCode loose.

Pro-Tip: Don’t just raw-dog your codebase. Use plan or @explore to have a conversation first and only switch to build when there is a clear path.

Connecting the Dot(file)s

All things said and done, Windows will never replicate the raw speed of Linux. But if you’re shipping code, and you do find yourself on a Windows machine, not all hope is lost. It’s not without its quirks, but after dealing with nonsense like missing icons and ads in your start menu, it’s good to know that there is still another way. Just pop open a terminal, ignore the OS noise, and start cooking.

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P.S: If you want get that same vibe like in the screenshots on your Windows machine, you can steal my minimalist dotfiles for WezTerm and Starship here: github.com/burninc0de/win-dotfiles