| What exactly are you trying to script and manipulate on company computers? (i.e. are you just playing around or trying to write your own programs, or is there some business process you're trying to automate?) Assuming you're just playing around and not trying to build something for business/professional use: Can you access Powershell at all (the new-ish and improved Windows terminal)? You can write scripts in it. If you prefer GNU/Linux apps, you can try a portable build of Cygwin (which lets you run Bash and some utils): https://github.com/MachinaCore/CygwinPortable (edit: or see Git Bash, as posted by Leftium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41052353) Also check out Portable Apps: https://portableapps.com/apps As a last resort, you might be able to put Linux on a USB drive (or disk drive, if it has one) and boot into that, if the BIOS lets you. Some of the Live CDs have a "diskless" mode that won't cause any permanent changes to the system. There's probably also a lot of online tools that can do some of that inside a web browser (like word processors and PDF editors and text manipulation). You can also run code inside codesandbox/codepen/hosted code space of your choice. Or you can look for portable interpreters for Node (Javascript), maybe Python, Lua, etc. For window management, Windows has some nice shortcuts built-in (like drag a window to a side to fill half the screen, windows+arrow keys to move things around, or Windows+tab or alt-tab to switch between apps, etc. ---------- On the other hand, if you're actually trying to write something for the company, you should probably talk to your IT department about it and collaborate on a solution. Don't write something bespoke that nobody else can maintain once you're gone (or just promoted). Especially if it's actually tied to some industrial processes! |
For example, we need technical drawings of parts, the only way is through a web interface that fetches from some remote server and you can only do one at a time. So you will often see people copy pasting (or even typing if they're reading from paper) each item code one by one and printing one by one. Another common thing, we use SAP for most things but Excel is required for some stuff by my direct leader but also higher management and there's a lot of sort of awkward getting things out of SAP and into spreadsheets in the right format. So here some basic data manipulation is needed and you see literally everyone doing everything manually most of the time.
In general, I just want to not be wasteful and do repetitive things manually while using a computer with Windows, which is something I'm not used to
Using tool websites is a bit annoying since so much stuff is just blocked