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

62 points| pkrumins | 16 years ago |catonmat.net | reply

69 comments

order
[+] rbanffy|16 years ago|reply
- 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.

[+] bmj|16 years ago|reply 

  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
[+] mey|16 years ago|reply 

  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
[+] chime|16 years ago|reply
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)

[+] windsurfer|16 years ago|reply
I applaud you making HotChime, but how does it compare to Launchy?
[+] Dbug|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] adrianwaj|16 years ago|reply
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

[+] malkia|16 years ago|reply
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

[+] dkersten|16 years ago|reply
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).

[+] kellishaver|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] johns|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] samdk|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jordyhoyt|16 years ago|reply
VirtualBox is so great. I found it by accident and now can't imagine developing without it. So simple, so many nice options.
[+] willwagner|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] stan_rogers|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] altano|16 years ago|reply
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).
[+] henrikschroder|16 years ago|reply
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

[+] Tagith|16 years ago|reply
AFAIK, indexed search was part of Vista as well. Incredibly slow compared to locate on Linux though. I haven't tried locate32 myself.
[+] bliss|16 years ago|reply
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)
[+] joe_bleau|16 years ago|reply
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.

[+] barrkel|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] pragmatic|16 years ago|reply
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/