Must-Have Windows Programs (or Windows Programs that I use) | Hacker News Reader

Must-Have Windows Programs (or Windows Programs that I use)

catonmat.net

62 pointspkrumins69 comments

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- Cygwin (with ssh, scp, git, svn, grep, sed... X is nice too and so is MinTTY)

- Emacs (the Windows executable is a bit of a pain to integrate with the Cygwin side)

- GIMP

- Firefox (with Firebug)

- Chrome (nice developer support too)

- Pidgin (because I have friends on MSN, Gtalk, ICQ, iChat and IRC)

- Skype (because not everyone can type)

- Sysinternals (running pagedefrag is like brushing the machine's teeth)

- JDK (because it's nice to be able to compile Java code from time to time). You may want it with Eclipse or NetBeans or both, but writing Java code is not that nice.

- Freemind (another reason to have a JRE)

- Openoffice (because you really don't want to save .doc files)

I think that covers everything I need on a Windows box. Too bad Gnome support is so minimal on that OS.

  1. Notepad++ (though I'm almost 100% Emacs at this point)
  2. Filezilla
  3. imo.im client (because I need Skype for work, but the latest client does Bad Things with MS Office 2007)
  4. Cygwin
  5. PowerShell
  6. Paint.NET
  7. Wireshark
  8. SysInternals Process Explorer
  9. Reflector

  My Mods/Adds
  1) JEdit and VIM
  10) Slickrun (floating command prompt)
  11) Fiddler2
  12) Visual VM
  13) 7-zip instead of WinRar from the original article

I recently wrote this up after switching back to Windows from OS X--it's mostly a bunch of apps that mimic Mac functionality (Expose, etc), but also some useful generic utilities linked:

http://www.matthewwegner.com/switching-back-to-windows/

Synergy - to share keyboard and mouse with other computers & OSes. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Scott Hanselman has answered this question to my satisfaction:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDev...

Wow. XML Notepad is just what I had been looking for.

Windows apps I can't live without in order of importance:

1. StrokeIt

2. HotChime (disclaimer: I wrote it)

3. EmEditor (text-ed of choice)

4. Popular stuff: Thunderbird, Pidgin, Chrome, FF

5. ChimeNote (disclaimer: I wrote it)

6. FileZilla

7. MySQL Front v2.5 (all other versions suck)

8. UltraVNC

9. PuTTy

10. Paint Shop Pro / Paint.NET (either works)

I applaud you making HotChime, but how does it compare to Launchy?

Honestly, I haven't even tried anything else because I'm just so used to HotChime. I've been using it for 7-8 years now and can't work without it. I know it's not polite to toot your own horn but I would have said this about HotChime regardless of who wrote it. While I can't compare it to Launchy or others, I can tell you how HotChime works.

No matter which app you're in, press [pause] and type anything. If it has a space character in it, it will Google it. Otherwise, it will launch default browser to www.[whatyoutyped].com. If you have predefined [whatyoutyped] to something else, it will open that (website, file, folder). I have HN mapped to 'h', Slashdot mapped to '/.' (literally) and my local weather to 'w'. You can also setup custom %s searches for F1-F5 key. I have F2 = Wikipedia (mapped to chir.ag/wiki/%s e.g. http://chir.ag/wiki/hacker ), F3 = Dictionary, F4 = Thesaurus, F5 = PHP manual.

It's not that useful for average users but for powerusers/keyboard-types, it works great. Also, it's a single 37kb exe, no install/uninstall. Do realize that I wrote this in 2003, long before every browser had a search box and before Google had maps/local-searching. Yahoo was the first browser with zip-code searching. If I made a new version, I would add lots of small features like built-in calculator, suggest, file-browsing etc. But for now it works well for me.

Sounds nothing like Launchy. Launchy searches for apps of similar names as what you searched, and ranks them in order of usage. Makes the Start Menu obsolete.

Your app sounds not quite as good as mapping your browser's address bar to I'm Feeling Lucky.

http://www.sublimetext.com/ My text editor of choice for windows for the last six months.

A Windows desktop box is kept around mainly for gaming. (all on the road, kitchen, and sofa activity has moved to a MacBook Pro that has Ubuntu in a VM, but no flavor of Windows for now - don't want to pirate it, and won't pay for it). I would litterbox Windows in a VM on the desktop box, but for gaming the video driver situation is better booting directly into it. VirtualBox is used for speedy access to Ubuntu (where all email access and routine net browsing is done for safety). VLC is the default media viewer. Handbrake and FFMPEG seem to run better within Ubuntu, but the Windows versions are installed too. Firefox with NoScript and Adblock Plus is there mostly for updates to Virtual Box and as a backup in case of problems with it.

MS Windows Security Essentials seems to work decently, so AVG has finally been retired. It's surprising it took MS so long to provide these tools considering that Windows is pretty much unusable online without something. Better late than never, even if the only net access is for games, updates, and the VM.

Mikogo - screen, keyboard and mouse sharing - super for remote support

HarddiskOgg - record music playing from soundcard (eg from grooveshark, youtube) into a file format of choice.

WiFi Hopper - shareware - very accurate overview of wifi points in the area. It shows points that don't appear in other programs.

Spyware Doctor - the most powerful spyware remover

Startup Manager - disable unneeded processes carefully

MediaCoder / ColorPic / GTalk

1. FAR (Far Manager) - like Total Commander, but I'm more used to it, than TC

2. SystemInternals Tools (Procmon, Procexp most used by them from me) - the best of the best, they make me hate Windows less.

3. CYGWIN - Brings the sanity on the command-line, and havoc if you decide to integrate them for other people, but great tools overall

4. Dependancy Walker.

5. WinMerge - my favourite windows differ/merger - there might be better tools than it, but I'm really used to it. At work my perforce P4Merge p4Diff is replaced by that one, the minute I get a new machine.

6. Trillian - I bought it, and I don't regret it.

7. Skype

8. Scintilla Editor - I also use emacs, and Lispworks for editing, but Scintilla is powerful (especially useful is to replace all \n to " ", or ";" to "\n" - for example if you are lazy parsing the PATH variable - you can doit command-line, but you can teach other people to use it through Scintilla easier).

9. Xobni - bought yesterday the full version, although my company could've pay, I decided that $30 is well spend on organizing my job better. Wonderful plugin

GridMove.

I spend most of my time in a tiling window manager in linux and I'd go insane without some half-decent tiling support. GridMove isn't perfect, but its enough to keep me happy when I use Windows outside of gaming (where I obviously don't need tiling) or running Visual Studio (which I run in full screen, so also don't need tiling).

It's rare that I use Windows these days, but Crimson Editor, AVG, Malwarebytes, Digsby, Launchy, TinyGrab, PuTTy, WinSCP, Winamp Classic, VLC.... then there's a lot of everyday, non-windows specific (not that everything in the previous list is) stuff that I use, like git, Skype, FF, Photoshop & Illustrator, etc.

If you can get over that it's made by Microsoft, Windows Security Essentials is free and IMO better than AVG. I also saw somewhere that it outperforms it but I don't recall the source.

Cool, thanks for the tip. I don't have a problem with "made by Microsoft" I'd just always used AVG, had never had any problems with it, so hadn't bothered to switch to anything else.

AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) - It's an extremely powerful, scriptable hotkey application. It's one of the few things I miss on Linux.

The other thing I use a lot is VirtualBox, because I can no longer bring myself to do actual development on Windows.

VirtualBox is so great. I found it by accident and now can't imagine developing without it. So simple, so many nice options.

Is there a "Must-Have" file backup utility for Windows?

I've really grown to like TimeMachine on the Mac, although I don't really need the eye candy; I just want something that dependably backs up my data to my NAS, stays in the background and does it's work without killing my pc's performance.

I've found Acronis TrueImage (Home edition) to be as unobtrusive as it gets on Windows. It starts and stops when told, and so far plays nice with other disk IO. That's not a formal review -- I just haven't noticed it running the way I've noticed backup utils I've used before.

If you have Windows 7, just use the built-in backup. If you're willing to buy a Windows Home Server, that works great too (and does a lot more than backup).

It's worth noting that Windows 7 obsoletes a bunch of those utilities:

TrueCrypt - Bitlocker comes with it Locate32 - Indexed search is now built-in Launchy - Start menu now defaults to search DUMeter - Part of the Task Manager Taskbar Shuffle - Finally possible directly in windows

AFAIK, indexed search was part of Vista as well. Incredibly slow compared to locate on Linux though. I haven't tried locate32 myself.

My windows 7 PC is a games machine, so special list for windows 7 is as follows:

  1. COD MW2

Windows XP machine

  1. VirtuaWin - Multi desktop (my switch desktop shortcut is ctrl+alt+win+arrows) (GPL)
  2. YzShadow - drop shadow on windows (pointless pretty eye candy) (Free)
  3. GVim (GPL)
  4. Abyss Web Server (simple local webserver) (BSD)
  5. On Windows XP - Royale Noir Theme (Kinda Hacky Commercial)
  6. Office 2007 (Commercial)
  7. TOAD (Commercial)
  8. cmd.exe (Commercial)

I didnt' see these mentioned:

Ditto Clipboard Manager

http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/

Winsplit Revolution

http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/

And ToDoList is the best lightweight, local list/project manager I've come across. I've read that it runs fine under Wine, and it writes to a usable XML format.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx

I've got a little windows utility called "open". If I'm in a dos box and want to open a windows explorer instance in the current directory, I just type "open .". It globs too, so if I'd like to view all the pdf files in the current directory, I can "open *.pdf". I use it all the time.

NTP has been ported to windows, and I run it on all my machines.

rsync, of course.

NSIS for building install programs. Maybe there's something better out there--I haven't looked in a while.

I'm still on the fence about dropbox...maybe.

The cmd builtin 'start' will do much of that, but not for globs.

Under cygwin, I'd do this for an equivalent to what you describe as 'open':

    #!/bin/bash
    for f; do
      cygstart "$f"
    done

cygstart is much the same as cmd start, except it understands Cygwin paths.

And globbing is exactly why I wrote open, instead of using start. Good point about cygstart; I'd forgotten about it.

Almost forgot about another one--I still use some of the MS powertoys.

I've found that the windows key + start typing is pretty nice in Win 7, removes the need for many other utilities.

  1. Display Fusion (In UltraMon the font on task bars in my 2nd and 3rd monitor is unreadable)
  2. Ditto - clipboard manager (free, open source )
  3. Used so be Foxit Reader, now it's Sumatra PDF
  4. Used to use Foxit's ifilter for searching PDF's but now I see it's commercial: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/

I'll spare everyone the Outlook/OneNote and just list the possibly unusual:

  - VistaSwitcher (alt-tab replacement)
  - FeedDemon (most RSS is actually on iPhone with MobileRSS)
  - LastPass (Firefox plugin)
  - HandBrake (and complimentary Bulk Rename Utility)
  - Paint.Net (free image editor)
  - Windows Live Photo Gallery
  - Live Mesh
  - JungleDisk (backup to S3)

Be careful with FeedDemon. It uses IE to display blog posts, and we all know what may happen if you browse the net with IE...

"I can’t imagine working on a computer without Total Commander. [...] . Total Commander is what separates boys from men."

Every other pieces of software on the list is optional for me, except Total Commander. It's the only software I ever miss when not on windows (and fortunately I'm rarely on windows anymore these days). I have found nothing that comes even close to it on linux/macos.

On Windows, my tasks generally involve using Visual Studio for editing files and Remote Desktop for deployment. On Linux, I think a lot more before I type out that one liner.

So, what value does Total Commander provide? I'm always interested in being more efficient.

It's like the vi or emacs of file managers. It's kinda hard to explain. It's value increases exponentially with the amount of customization you put into it. I polished my settings for years until I got to what I'm using now; but from then on, I never changed a single setting, I'm using the same settings file as for version 4 - current version is 7; It's got everything from different colors by file type to shortcuts for different folders, ftp, scp, crc verification, multiple file rename, viewers for lots of formats, tons of plugins...

Snagit v9 (photo editing, screen capturing)

Tableau (hands down the best analytics tool for web traffic)

Balsamiq Mockups (great wireframe software, just like paper/pencil!)

Balsamiq Mockups looks great. Thanks for that!

For screen capture stuff I tend to use http://jingproject.com

FTP is dead and unsecure.

Is SFTP bad? I have problems with WinSCP using SCP all the time I don't have with the same app using SFTP.

Example, if you're wondering: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/scp-...

SFTP is a file transfer protocol over SSH, so it is plenty secure. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_file_transfer_protocol

Does anyone know of good ram disk software for windows? In Ubuntu I just put my project files in /dev/shm and they are really in ram but I can't find a good one for Windows. I had bought a software to do this a while back but I no longer have it. Looking for a free/open alternative.

Try ImDisk: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

http://superuser.com/questions/34388/whats-the-best-ramdisk-...

a few more ideas, and links to even more

Google desktop anyone?

It's fast and searches in your outlook email. I get about 120 emails a day and reply to a lot of them. Any effort to organize them (I recommend CleaContext for this task) will include some errors at which point only a powerful search tool like google desktop can help.

Has it become any less bloated over the years? I tried it some 5 years ago and it devastated my computer's performance. Was very surprising for a google app, too.

PrtScr - for screenshots is something I recently discovered. It's a neat little app.

Huh?

The PrtSc key on your keyboard does the same. Fire up MS Paint and paste into it :-D

That app lets you mark the screen and select the area of the screen to screenshot just from hitting the PrtScrn key.

Here's my list of how to make a Windows machine more hospitable for a focus-follows-mouse Linux user:

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users

Seconded:

* Synergy

* Beyond Compare

* Dependency Walker

* Sysinternals tools (of course, use http://live.sysinternals.com for easy download goodness)

Why isn't 7-Zip on that list? ( http://7-zip.org )

Why is VMWare and Beyond Compare listed as shareware? VMWare Player is free, but not Workstation. And I doubt Server is either (haven't looked). Beyond Compare is great, but it costs $30.

Server is free. http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ -- Mac vmware fusion still costs, though.

VMware Server (formerly GSX) is actually free as well.

Oh. I meant VMWare Workstation. (upading the post now.) And Beyond Compare is shareware, isn't it?

$30 for as many machines as you own, work or personal, for your own individual use.

Probably the best $30 I ever spent on software, given how many many times I use it per day.

And what about Sun's VirtualBox? It's free and pretty good from what I hear.

"As crappy as SQLyog is, it’s somehow the most usable MySQL front-end."

Ain't that the truth. The sucky thing is not only is SQLYog the best Windows frontend, it's better than anything on OS X too.

My list is rather small:

Beyond Compare - I have yet to find a comparison tool which is as versatile as Beyond Compare.

ClipX - It will change your life! :)

Vim - Can't live without it.

How does one change the paste in ClipX to Win+V like the author suggested? I can only change it to Ctrl/Alt/Shift+V.

It's always been Win+V by default for me...

Everything search. Changed my life.

http://www.voidtools.com/

I prefer FreeOTFE to TrueCrypt because it can use LUKS partitions (which are used by Linux).

  1. CodeSmith
  2. RoboCopy
  3. TortoiseSvn

Sysinternals stuff: Regmon, Filemon, TCPView

must-haves for whom?

I can't think of any identifiable group of users for whom this list can be the list of must-haves..

yeah a lot of the entries are garbage. windows media player classic is, according to him, the best video program on windows.

what.

Media Player Classic and especially its Home Cinema variant is excellent video player. It isn't really related to Windows Media Player in any way.

The only program one needs in Windows is putty, so to be able to connect to a REAL computer.

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