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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

> It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following...

Yep. On Windows there's:

    - IrfanView for image editing
    - foobar2000 for mp3s

They've been on my "must have" install list for ~20 years.

There's also Ditto for managing multiple clipboard entries. It's a good example of how a small open source tool with an optimized UI for 1 thing ends up being 100x better than the same feature MS tried to implement straight into Windows.

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I use Imagine for image viewing. It has an amazing little feature: when you press the "Next Image" (or "Previous Image") button and the window resizes/moves to keep its size consistent with the new image's size, the mouse cursor is automatically moved to still be over that "Next"/"Previous" button.

It most likely takes about 5 lines of code to implement but what's important that the author actually thought about and took care about this scenario.

Fricking awesome.

7-zip has already been mentioned, but I want to mention Notepad++. It's not as featureful as a full-on IDE or most modern extensible text editors, but it's fast and has a simple classic UI. When I just want to edit a basic text file I tend to use N++, as long as I'm on Windows and I don't want to boot up VSCode, let alone a full IDE.

I use N++ everyday and do love it; though I recently found out that it completely freezes trying to open modest sized single-line json (couple MB), which made me sad.

Open it as plain text. It does the same thing trying to highlight large XML files.

There is also a plugin to reformat JSON.

Not open source, but mp3tag [1] and Notepad++ [2] (which is) would also be on my Windows list. For Mac I'd add MarkEdit [3], which is less than 3MB, carefully feature-scoped, and has a responsive developer behind it.

[1] https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

[3] https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit

I would add Everything by VoidTools. It completely changes one's workflow.

In your opinion what advantages does Ditto have over win+V? I've only used Ditto very briefly but didn't immediately notice anything too wildly different from the built-in implementation.

For a multi-clipboard manager I'm looking for:

    - Configure hot keys to bring up the clipboard selector (I use CTRL + Alt + V)
    - Quickly select a clipboard item via hot key, arrow keys or mouse
    - Search through the list of clipboard items immediately
    - Configure how many items get saved and when they expire
    - Ability to paste in plain-text as a separate hot key

Ditto hits all of those marks. Overall it feels like it was built by a person who actively uses it.

Paint.NET is another must have for me. I do have Photoshop installed but for some very simple things I don't have to load Photoshop.

For me the killer audio player was Winamp. I could hide the window and control everything via keyboard shortcuts.

It was the perfect program: completely invisible and yet completely functional.

i think this applies to every audio player software that has ever been developed

I mean, iTunes exists.

Was because you left Windows? Development picked up again.

I was thinking about trying Winamp again at some point, but nowadays I use Spotify, and shuffling a ton of MP3s across systems doesn't seem as compelling as it did 10 or 15 years ago. I guess I don't really have a strong need for an mp3 player anymore.

I add 7-Zip and SpeedCrunch to the list

And Paint.NET.

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