
Must-Have Windows Programs (or Windows Programs that I use) - pkrumins
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/must-have-windows-programs/
======
rbanffy
\- 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

      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

      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

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matthew-wegner
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/>

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

------
anelson
Scott Hanselman has answered this question to my satisfaction:

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDev...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx)

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

~~~
chime
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.

~~~
TheSOB88
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.

------
3dFlatLander
<http://www.sublimetext.com/> My text editor of choice for windows for the
last six months.

------
Dbug
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
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
kellishaver
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.

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

------
willwagner
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
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.

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

------
bliss
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)

------
pasbesoin
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>

------
joe_bleau
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
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.

~~~
joe_bleau
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.

------
pragmatic
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/

------
altano
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)

~~~
pkrumins
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...

------
mtarnovan
"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.

~~~
bfung
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.

~~~
mtarnovan
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...

------
AFerenci
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!)

~~~
thorax
For screen capture stuff I tend to use <http://jingproject.com>

------
sp332
_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-...](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-
general-1/scp-text-file-busy-error-365198/)

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

------
johnwatson11218
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.

~~~
pkrumins
Try ImDisk: <http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk>

------
timurlenk
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.

~~~
jordyhoyt
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.

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

~~~
mahmud
Huh?

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

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

------
davidw
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>

------
thorax
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> )

------
varikin
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.

~~~
ibsulon
Server is free. <http://www.vmware.com/products/server/> \-- Mac vmware fusion
still costs, though.

------
eli
"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.

------
solutionyogi
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.

~~~
chime
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.

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

------
baddox
Everything search. Changed my life.

<http://www.voidtools.com/>

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

------
jasonkester

      1. CodeSmith
      2. RoboCopy
      3. TortoiseSvn

------
migpwr
Sysinternals stuff: Regmon, Filemon, TCPView

------
padmanabhan01
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..

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

what.

~~~
zokier
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.

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

