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7 Must-Have Programs for Windows

March 28, 2006

When I start using a new Windows PC, the first thing I do is install these 7 programs:

PrimoPDF (Free) — make PDFs from any program that can print.  This program is so essential, it should come bundled with the Operating System!

Scintilla (Free) — my notepad replacement of choice.  It's FAST, has syntax highlighting for all the languages I code in, opens multiple files in TABs, and has standard key bindings (CTRL-F for find, F3 for next find, etc.)

InfoRapid Search & Replace (Free) — a search and replace tool.  The windows "search in files" feature is just flaky.  And grep doesn't always cut it.  This program shows results with matches highlighted for fast scanning and even does regular-expression search and replacements across files.

Unix Utils (Free) — a poor man's unix command line for Windows.  Seriously, grep, find, xargs, ls,  head/tail, sort, gawk, diff, touch, etc., they're pretty much all here (get Vi here).  And you can run them from DOS (no shell necessary).

Sysinternals Utils (Free) — process explorer, TCPView and Filemon have pretty much saved me from having to buy or use expensive specialized profiling tools for debugging.

SnagIT (~ $30)  — makes taking screenshots a snap.  Somtimes CTRL-ALT-PRINTSCREEN isn't enough.  SnagIT let's you take screenshots and edit them quickly.  The video capture mode let's you create an .AVI for easy demo creation.

Araxis Merge ($130)  — an excellent diff tool.  Diff'ing isn't just about file changes.  Folder diff's effortlessly answer the age old "it works here, but why doesn't it work there?" question.  There have been times when I've asked someone to zip up their entire c:\tomcat folder and give it to me so I can find which 2 lines (out of 100s of files & folders) are holding up the deployment.  Do this a couple of times and you'll convince yourself the price is worth it.  Oh, and it's FAST and never crashes.

Update July 18, 2007: Recently I found the excellent DiffMerge tool from SourceGear. It's free, has a nice GUI, and it's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Comparing with Araxis Merge, Pros: Araxis has a better interface and shows folder diff results in real-time, Cons: Araxis' is not free, their 3-way diff feature is available in their more expensive version, and it's not cross-platform.

March 28, 2006 at 08:00 AM in General | Permalink

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Comments

I would add IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) to this list. An excellent image viewer (and more than a viewer).

Posted by: seid | Mar 28, 2006 8:21:37 AM

On Windows my Swiss knife is definitely Total Commander, a $34 file manager that you can test for free.

Dual panel with tabs and bookmarks, ftp client, sftp client (with plugin), excellent search tool with regex support, diff directories, make CRC or md5, zip, tar, etc...

And most important, plenty of keybord shorcuts do to all this really fast.

kawas

Posted by: kawas | Mar 29, 2006 4:39:10 AM

don't know "Araxis Merge", but I use WinMerge which does the job pretty well. & it's free & open source

Posted by: fraaargh | Apr 18, 2006 6:40:15 PM

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