I found these online and added them to my gitconfig at one point... I can't take credit for them. Integrating fzf with git makes working with branches even better (with fuzzy matches for checking out as well as deleting branches)...
I was working for a team that didn't have any mobile developers so we had outsourced an iOS app to connect with our SOAP based API. A few years later, our mobile app was woefully out of date, so I thought I'd take upon myself to 1) learn Swift and 2) convert the library over. Unfortunately, it was a nightmare to work with SOAP (and XML) in Objective C and Swift, so I played with an abstraction to help with parsing XML. The end result became an early version of SWXMLHash [1].
The irony is that I never finished the rewrite, but the library was helpful to other Swift developers so I've been maintaining it since.
This looks great - I was working with an old iOS app back when Swift was first released and I wrote an XML parsing library SOLELY because the SOAP support was horrific. I think this will help a lot of people. If you don't mind, I might add a link to your repo from my README just to help point people towards a better approach over manual XML parsing.
Agreed regarding the default tab completion. You might check out PSReadLine at some point - see https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine. Its goal is to try to emulate readline except in PowerShell (this includes tab completion as well as emacs shortcut keys... vim shortcut keys are in the works AFAIK). It does require some additional configuration and it isn't installed by default, but I think it helps with this specific scenario quite a bit.
It's on iOS, too. I just installed it! I had to find another app from Google so that I could get to the list of all apps from them to see it first, though.
I've used it for the last 3 or 4 presentations I've given and it has worked out well. It doesn't come with a huge variety of themes, but it is easy to share - I can just push it out to Github Pages.
Related, but for the same reasons, you could also write classic ASP using JavaScript (as opposed to VBScript). Years ago, I spent months trying to convince my team to let me use JavaScript instead of VBScript in our ASP files.
I'm a CS grad, but I had zero knowledge of programming when I entered college - I knew some basics about HTML and I could fix some basic computer issues but that is it. I remember trying to open an executable in Notepad and thinking to myself, "uh oh, this is going to be really hard."
I was still struggling with syntax issues into my second year of school. It's not a good feeling to be debugging null pointer issues and data structures when you're not confident with the syntax.
Agreed - I'm hopeful that npm can see some love on Windows as well. As more and more utilities take advantage of node that aren't strictly web-related, having first-class npm support on Windows will be even more helpful.
I'm a .NET dev by day and a Rails hobbyist by night, but I agree with the prior comment regarding learning Vim or Emacs. I can relate to your experience with it feeling small in comparison to VS, but there are tools out there (ViEmu, VsVim) that will let you use the Vim knowledge gained in VS and it will make VS better. I started learning Vim a couple of years back and it was the best decision I made.
If you choose Emacs, I believe VS has Emacs key-binding support built in.