Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

hanselman.com

226 pointsyread81 comments

Reading this list somehow forces me to accelerate my Linux training/usage deeper.

After working with dual, triple monitors, with tons of tools, heavy IDEs, plugins, etc. At one point I decided that someday I will switch everything to a setup similar to Derek Sivers (http://derek.sivers.usesthis.com/).

Linux. Vim _and_ Emacs. All command-line tools. No XOrg except for browsing. Minimal Window Manager.

To each of his own though. I still recognize people who like to switch and try tools. Not about right or wrong but more about who you are and what you want to do.

  Vim _and_ Emacs

I'm really interested in your use cases. Personally I would have started with emacs (because of emacs coworkers) but working on old solaris installs (with only Vi available) forced me the other way. Once Vi(m) was ingrained it was really hard to give emacs a try.

I forced myself to learn Vim for the same reason. I could rely on Vi being available on any system I logged into, which was quite a diverse set at the time with installations going back many years.

I've thought that I should learn Emacs just to see what the fuss is about and so I can make an informed decision about the differences, but the fact is that I no longer have the pressure to put in all that time. Vim works for me, and I there is no compelling reason to invest all that time learning another editor as an experiment at this time.

Even though I live in emacs, at a command line my fingers are so used to typing "vi somefile" that they do so before conscious thought occurs. Which is not to say I spend a lot of time setting up my vi.

Hey, I might be a victim of Vim as well. We'll see. I'd like to be able to use both just in case... :D

Another Vim user here. I learned about Vimperator from Hanselman's site. I just can't use another browser!

He really throws the kitchen sink in on this list, however. File Managers, music players, presentation tools, even what he uses to occupy his kids. I think if you were to sit down and discuss what you used on linux, the list would be very long, if very text based.

Last time I installed Arch I used that setup. I installed Xorg with wmii, but even that felt like too much, so I never loaded it. One tty for elinks, Hacker News is one of the best looking sites for text browsers.

I may not use Arch though (could be Ubuntu-Server).

Elinks looks great! (maybe better than Lynx) but I'm not sure I'll go that extreme (although, I might if I had the same experience like yours).

I have to admit that I own an iPad 2 and it has changed my habit. Computer (laptops or workstations) are for serious working only lately. For everything else, iPad (or any tablet for that matter).

By the way, would you mind to share some information/knowledge on how to build such system? It's been years since the last time I installed a minimum FreeBSD. My plan is to buy a good enough laptop that works well with the available drivers out there.

If you want a terminal-only setup your hardware requirements are going to be pretty low. If you plan on doing a lot of compiling that's something to consider. The only driver issue you might run into is with wifi, but that's gotten a lot better in recent years.

I'd recommend Arch because their wiki/documentation is excellent. And if a minimum setup is what you're after, there is no better than Arch for that. And it forces you to learn some things to get everything up and running.

I'm only concerned of a few things:

1) Display Driver

Prefer not to mock around with resolution, color depth settings. Compile and install Xorg + any WM and just "startx" to work.

2) Sound Driver

Just work please :D

3) Networking (WiFi, etc)

As you said, it is getting better

4) USB (camera + extra external hdd)

Any recommended camera that works with Linux?

Would be Nice To Have (not a must):

5) Web Cam + Mic (for Skype)

Keep in mind, too, that some folks actually have to work on Windows 7.

I would, however, be anxious to hear about stripped down Windows 7 environments.

I'm glad he mentioned AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com/). It's a very powerful tool for keyboard/mouse automation, although its scripting language is rather quirky. (Watch out for the two very different forms of assignment statement, one that does string interpolation and the other that uses modern style expressions.)

I recently rewrote my JKLmouse utility (http://www.jklmouse.com/) as an AutoHotkey script, so it works on 64-bit versions of Windows and is easier to modify than the old C version I wrote years ago.

If you ever want to control the mouse pointer pixel by pixel, JKLmouse makes it easy. Whenever any mouse (TrackPoint/touchpad) button is down, the cursor keys and some home row and nearby keys turn into mouse movement keys. There's no special mouse key mode, it just works when you need it. You can also use Caps Lock to activate these mouse movement keys if you want to move the mouse without any mouse buttons down.

It really works nicely combined with the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad: I can hold down the mouse (TrackPoint) button and use the TrackPoint to move something close to where I want it, and then just keep the button down and use the JKLmouse keys to position it exactly.

There is a similar program on Scott's list, TouchCursor (http://touchcursor.sourceforge.net/). I think the interaction is smoother with JKLmouse - but I would say that, wouldn't I? :-)

Vim users may not like the choice of home row cursor keys in either of these utilities, but TouchCursor has a dialog to change the settings, and JKLmouse being an AutoHotkey script, you can just modify the JKLmouse.ahk file and run it directly under AutoHotkey.

I recommend installing 7zip even if you never use the 7z format archives. It's just so much faster than the built-in .zip file handling in Windows. (Which is not as stupid-slow in Win7 as Vista and XP, but still not great.) And its implementation of DEFLATE has higher compression than zlib.

7zip also handles RAR format which, suprisingly, probably the #2 format extension out there behind zip.

always used winrar. never missed any format. i see no reason to abandon it for 7zip

winrar has the best integration with the windows shell (by that i mean sane context menus)

Best reason for me has always been that WinRAR is shareware and 7-zip is OSS.

This list misses "Everything", the instant file search engine. It's the app I miss the most on Linux and OS X. (http://www.voidtools.com/)

Everything's secret is that it taps into the file system journal to instantly know about any file name change. On *nix systems "locate" needs to manually rescan the whole HD to update its database, so you can't use it to quickly find a recent file, and Spotlight on OS X is just a joke when it comes to finding a file by its name. (Or when you simply want to know where a file is)

No, it's under 'Things Windows Forgot':

"VoidTools Everything Search Engine - Sometimes you just want a text box, a 300k application and you want to Search Everything. This tiny utility makes it super easy to search your entire hard drive (all of them actually) instantly. You can Google the whole internet with Bing in a second, why shouldn't you be able to do the same with your hard drive. Best part is that it works on any version of Windows, even Windows 2000."

I second this. "Everything" feels magically fast and is the most overlooked Windows app out there.

I wonder if this exists as a feature request for locate to hook into inotify for filesystem changes. Great idea!

Is it really that much better than Spotlight on OS X?

This list is pointless without the almighty Directory Opus, the only thing I miss about windows. Oh my god it is the most amazing filemanager ever.

http://www.gpsoft.com.au/program/screenshots.html

Total Commander is, hands down, the best file manager out there. Nothing really comes close in terms of speed and customization.

Quite honestly, it's a big part of the reason I still keep a Windows station at work (along with an MBP and an Ubuntu box).

Bah. That's a kid's toy compared to holy grail of file managers - the http://www.farmanager.com

Indeed.

Far Manager, Ctrl+O full screen switching, and having all shell commands (cmd.exe that is) for you is just amazing.

Searching, Sorting, Renaming, Editing, browsing .ZIP files, and even .EXE resources, like a proper tool would do it (nm that is).

FAR is amazing!

And his older brethren midnight commander is doing pretty good too (I'm also an OSX, Linux user)...

More power to such tools!

wouldn't that be Total Commander?

I chose xplorer2 over Directory Opus for one reason. Opus, like the built in Explorer, always groups files and directories in it's list. For example, in Explorer, if I sort a large folder by "Date Modified", the files are shown first, then the directories.

Xplorer2 does "the right thing" and interlaces them.

Well, it is a big list, isn't it? I doubt that the author actually uses all of these tools. Consider that the list contains Cygwin plus a whole bunch of utilities that are native Cygwin applications (Gnu Tools, Tailers, Splitters, and more).

This list left me feeling that it needs to be proctored or maintained. I don't want a list of utilities that somebody tried once; I want a list of good utilities.

From the very first & second paragraphs of the link:

Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, "util" means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb.

...

Here are most of the contents of my C:\UTILS folder. These are all well loved and used. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them. No one paid money to be on this list and no money is accepted to be on this list.

I use these almost daily:

* Total commander (all-in-one file manager)

* The Regex Coach (useful if you work with regular expressions)

* Notepad++ (text editing)

* Beyond compare (visual diff)

* XnView (image viewer)

* putty (SSH/SCP)

* Sysinternals pack (various system tools)

You should try then the 150 utilities from nirsoft which are bundled in one launcher: http://launcher.nirsoft.net/download.html And then use that launcher to combine sysinternals and nirsofts tools in one gui. Here is described how:http://www.thewindowsclub.com/integrate-sysinternal-suite-wi...

If someone likes Total Commander, they might want to try FreeCommander (which is roughly the same thing, but free).

It's pretty well maintained. I run not only PowerShell and Cygwin but straight DOS and sometimes I like having, for example, baretail in the path, rather than messing with Cygwin. Also I keep the loose cmd line utils in dropbox and in the path for machines that don't have Cygwin.

Try GOW instead of cygwin... doesn't have X11, but just about handles most needs.

good list. i use lots of sysinternals and nirsoft utils daily. also teracopy, ultramon and Classic Shell http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ is a must for anyone who wants the old winxp-like start menu, copy/move sanity and other explorer goodness. also Beyond Compare and Regexbuddy, PowerGrep, Notepad++/notepad2

No list of Window utilities can be complete without even mentioning Total Commander (or Windows Commander as we called it back in time).

It's so essential to me that I wouldn't mind if Windows decided to remove Windows Explorer & Desktop completely from the next version.

I chose xplorer2 over Total Commander for one reason. TC, like the built in Explorer, always groups files and directories in it's list. For example, if I sort a large folder by "Date Modified", the files are shown first, then the directories.

Xplorer2 does "the right thing" and interlaces them.

Great list, I'll add my suggestion.

I really like Divvy. Easy to partition windows on your screen

http://mizage.com/#windivvy

I use it when transcribing notes from a browser, or impromptu dashboards

In my wish list: I would like to "save a configuration" of windows.

Often I'm programming away, with some perfect configuration, but then need to go look something up (maybe steal code from a local file), which entails opening other windows etc. I'd love to be able to come back to the orig config with a keypress.

Pointers welcome.

I really, really like GridMove for managing window locations: http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html

For the past couple years I've been using a multiple monitor taskbar tool called Actual Multiple Monitors (http://www.actualtools.com/multiplemonitors/) which I think is superior to the tools he recommends (at least it was at the time I tried the others). It allows you to have a fully functional taskbar on every monitor (start menu, notifications area, aero preview, the whole 9 yards).

After becoming accustomed to this tool, I'm convinced this is the right answer for how an OS should do multiple monitors, and I find Windows 7's out of the box support for multiple monitors offensively bad.

All OS's support multiple monitors offensively badly.

The least bad used to be linux with Gnome, which had a bad default configuration but could be quickly configured to work great (without installing additional software even). Of course both Unity and Gnome 3 screwed that up.

Overall I think multiple monitor support isn't on most software developer's radar. Have you seen the full-screen mode in the latest OS X? That's not even bad design, it's absence of design.

On KDE 4.7 (or 4.5+, but there's no reason to use older versions) multiple monitors work exactly how I want them to. It's great.

The only issue is that there is no shortcut for moving windows from screen to screen by default; however, you can set it to be whatever you want from the settings so it isn't much of an issue.

And, unlike OS X, KDE actually has a great full screen mode. I've found that having a fullscreen browser (or two side-by-side) on one monitor and a full screen Emacs on the other is my perfect layout.

Apologies, when I said "all" I wasn't thinking of KDE which is actually the only major DE I've never used in a multi-monitor setup. From what you say I should probably try it.

> The least bad used to be linux with Gnome, which had a bad default configuration but could be quickly configured to work great

I had a pretty unpleasant experience getting multiple monitors to work properly with Gnome. It's been so long I couldn't tell you exactly what the issue was, though.

In contrast, multi-monitors 'just work' on both Windows and OSX, so I wouldn't say they support it "offensively badly".

> The least bad used to be linux with Gnome

I like to think it still is. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with Gnome 2.32 on my personal laptop. I'll switch to Arch when Ubuntu ceases support for 10.04, because Gnome 2 seems much saner than unity or gnome 3, at least for now.

Arch were the first onto gnome3. Gnome2 might be in the AUR, but if you just install gnome on Arch, you're getting Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell.

I saw the list of RegEx tools, and I've found that Regexbuddy just does all of that, better, faster, cleaner. It's 30€ or 30$ or something so it's not free but the amount of value I've gotten out of it is insane.

I actually saw Scott present some of these tools in person at User Group meeting in 2006. It was a lot more useful to see some of them in action rather than just read through a big list.

If the list is that huge, it's not really curated, it's just a dump. May as well have posted a link to download.com and a CSV file of all the things you could get there.

If your "essentials" list is over a hundred items long, you have a problem with prioritization.

Some of the tools are free and some are not. Also, some are open source, and others are proprietary. I'm sure he has his favorites, but others will certainly prioritize differently; either with their wallets or their ideologies.

> Personally I renamed Notepad2.exe to "n.exe" which saves me a few dozen "otepad"s a day.

Wow, such an idea has never occurred to me. A simple n.cmd in C:\Windows\system32 like so will save me a lot of typos:

    @echo off
    start notepad.exe %*

I'm surprised that Visual Assist wasn't mentioned, but the list does lean heavily toward .NET development so perhaps that's the reason why. Visual Studio handles code coloring for C# fine, but not at all well for C++.

I'm in love with the FAR Manager (http://www.farmanager.com/).

Also on my work windows 7 machine: cygwin, sysinternals (RamMap has been my favourite since I'm working on some relatively I/O data building system, and checking out and then flushing the file cache with it is nice way to verify how your app acts on the system)

Also DEJA Insight for profiling (markers, like PIX).

NirSoft is awesome, SciTE for editing, but lately more and more emacs.

On VS2010 - VS2P4 plugin for Perforce

A tad surprised to see Scott use an iPhone. C'mon Scott, give Nokia a call, I'm sure they'll be happy to give you a nice 800. Or, maybe a 900 even? :)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned StExBar -http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/StExBar.html. It is by far one of the most productive, general purpose windows add-on tools that I've ever found (if you call a file explorer add-on "general purpose").

EDIT: fixed formatting url.

In terms of compressors I would not say 7zip won. WinRAR delivers better compression ratio, and xz beats them both.

7-zip is also free, very easy to use, and fast. xz certainly misses the "very easy to use" part (an area on which WinRAR is also starting to lag behind) and, well, WinRAR isn't free (unless clicking "cancel" each time it starts up doesn't bug you).

This is why I think that all in all, 7-zip is definitely the best Windows archiver out there right now.

And all those are replaced with just one thing: Terminal :D.

He forgot good ole Directory Opus!

I just downloaded WindowsPad and it seems pretty useful, esp if you have several monitors.

I'll get off XP as soon as the properly alphabetize the programs under Control Panel.

Use Classic Shell (recommended elsewhere in the comments). Returns the Start Menu button to usability, breaks out the Control Panel into an alphabetical list, etc., etc.

SublimeText + Expandrive + Putty + Virtualbox is everything I need for now.

a twitter button should probably not be the biggest image on your page.

That's funny, I didn't even notice it. Banner burnout, I suppose.

Is there anything like this for Mac OS X?

Give Mike Gunderloy's list a shot http://afreshcup.com/home/2011/11/26/my-tools-of-the-trade-2...

Its a list, but its much shorter. I think that may because alot of the unix underpinnings to Mac means the power users just use those kinds of tools.

EDIT: Just found this http://www.macsparky.com/ but it seems like alot to dive in to.

David Sparks is a lawyer by trade instead of a developer but he is a big time Mac enthusiast and has a good site and podcast series. Most applicable to this discussing is probably podcast #51 where he talks about Menubars, Docks, and Dashboards. http://5by5.tv/mpu/51 The show notes for each podcast episode describe the applications they discuss.

Anybody got a good list for OSX?

Jesus, who even has time to sift through this list let alone try all these gewgaws. There's work to be done, don't get too wrapped up in your tools.

There's work to be done, don't get too wrapped up in commenting on something you weren't even interested in.

He sounds interested to me. To be fair nobody needs 8-10 tools for regexes alone. Except maybe Jeffrey Friedl. Recommending one or two would be plenty.

Agreed, at some point with some categories I admit in the post that I'm just collecting and reviewing tools, RegEx ones are a good example, for fun. Other times two or three tools exist because there is a specific gap in one filled by another.

It's a nice, comprehensive list. If you (or anyone else) feels inclined it'd be nice to have a heavily biased list of tools that in your opinion are the cream of the crop. A honed version of this bigger list.

Indeed a good idea. Every quarter or so I do lists of Top 3 this and the Esssential 5 that, pulled from this list.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek!

If you're a windows dev, if you've not got much time just scan through and look at the green items, the new additions.

It's nice, for example, to see Scott mention 7zip and curl, which I now use on windows too. It kinda makes you feel a little less of a traitor. Bins looks great and I also forgot about Console2 too, stupid cmd window not resizing.

>all these gewgaws. There's work to be done, don't get too wrapped up in your tools.

poor Windows people need all these exactly to get work done. (my current job is a windows shop, any simple *nix operation like find/grep/diff and the likes is an epic story scrum style (of course we have that too). Time to make a Xmas gift to myself and move back to a shop where Linux is allowed (that includes no "must-use" Outlook :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com