Comment by Kleo Petrov on "What are the few Open source tools/repositories that made your life "extremely easy" as a software developer?"

VS Code - this editors doesn't need introduction. I find myself using VS Code more and more on a daily basis. It's speed and extendability is what won in in the first place.
Webstorm (and most Jetbrains products) - when working with a large project, Webstorm is my editor of choice. The IDE is packed with everything one developer needs - from debugging and profiling tools to refactoring and static code analysis.
Cygwin - Linux awesomeness in Windows, that I cannot imagine living without. Cygwin is a command-line interface which brings Unix-like functionalities and commands. I'm using a terminal called cmder, which is built on top of Cygwin and is open-sourced too.
Git and GitHub - this is a no-brainer. In today's world, everyone should know how to use Git, at least the basics. With platforms like Github and Gitlab, which are build around Git, it's super easy to show your work, share your knowledge, learn from others and have fun in the process.
the Javascript ecosystem - the JavaScript ecosystem is one of the most dynamic out there. The open-source movement influenced the JavaScript ecosystem and changed the programming world as we know it.
Plain JavaScript - learning that awesome new framework or library is one thing, knowing how it works under the hood is a whole new story. Angular, React, VueJS and every other JS framework out there are plain JavaScript, wrapped in abstractions and APIs. While hated by many, JavaScript is and will be the language of the web and it won't change any time soon. While it was a kind of a mess until recently, it's getting better, literally by year.

Do you have Win10? If yes, do you prefer the native Linux interface or Cygwin, and why?

I'm using Windows 10 for a couple of years now. By Linux interface I imagine you mean the bash terminal, right? If so, I still prefer Cygwin. Cygwin's plugins can transform the basic terminal into a feature-packed program that can zip/unzip, support SSH, convert and optimize images on the fly and have commands autocomplete. Here is the whole list of plugins - Cygwin plugins list.

Another major advantage is the extensive styling options you have when using Cygwin. By editing the . minttyrc file, you can change every part of the terminal, from background to line highlights.

There are already several terminal emulators, built on top of Cygwin - cmder, Baboon, fatty to name a few, which are easy to install and configured out of the box.

I'm currently using cmder. It's one of the most popular Cygwin based emulators. The thing I like the most in cmder is that I can switch terminals on the fly - Powershell, Bash and even cmd, which makes it really convenient for almost every use case I have.

Interesting... I used Cygwin for a long time and still keep it around for bash testing purposes, but for my main CLI I've jumped to WSL. I found nodejs and Cygwin just didn't work together any more; plus Cygwin got significantly slower from Win8 onwards (figure they did something in the i/o layer that didn't agree with it).

Before switching to mac (only one month from now) I used windows my entire life. I tried a lot of terminals and emulators and settle with PowerShell, but then I met Hyper. In the end, I was using Hyper and the Ubuntu bash with some plugins and zsh in the Linux terminal, it was insane, funny, beautiful, powerful... and laggy. Sometimes the terminal just didn't close, so I rolled back to my PowerShell and it felt right.

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