Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you’ll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I’ve ever written and no matter how many tabs - it’s all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you’ll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it’s uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it’ll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn’t shit like this more implemented in software?
I use Libre Office as a word and excel replacement. Might not be a replacement for everyone if perfect compatibility/formatting is needed for work, but for personal use it’s been great.
It works great but I was heartbroken when I saw it ruined my beautifully formatted resume that was a .docx :(
Use markdown instead.
Just learned this in another thread so I’m stealing it and dropping it here.
https://christitus.com/windows-utility-improved/
To install/run it pop open Powershell as admin and run:
irm christitus.com/win | iex
It’s like Ninite on steroids. Install apps, OS tweaks, debloat, and more from one little app. This is going to me by go-to any time I reinstall Windows.
Just a heads-up:
This command will download a powershell script from christitus.com and run it on your PC with Admin rights.
I’d research what exactly it does first.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/releases/tag/24.11.25
I’ve recently discovered and made heavy use of xournal++; for stylus-based note taking.
I got heavy use out of that one as a teaching assistant in grad school during the pandemic. I used a cheap wacom drawing pad.
- VLC media player is the gold standard
- Open broadcasting software / stream labs for broadcasting and studio management
- Ffmpeg for video editing
- Yt-dlp for downloading video
- audacity MP3 editing
- Plex / jellyfin / Stashapp for media server
- Pixlr for cloud photo editing
- Yarn / chocolatey / Asdf / node / poetry - package management
- Flaresolver, pihole, home automation, nginx
- Qbit-*arr for file sharing
- Massgrave for windows activation
- Filezilla for ftp (upgrade hosting)
- Depending on bullshit level: discord, Google workspace offers custom domain Google accounts
- Anything past that I write for myself or find a project with a dockerfile
“Everything” - find any file on your machine instantly. No need to update an index, it uses the NTFS master file table directly.
I find it almost criminal the amount of people who do not know about this. Absolute life saver for work.
It is my pet peeve that instead of using the MFT, they gave us the bloody abomination they call windows search.
I mean, make it a hidden tool like regedit, for all I care. It’s really not that hard.
Is that because it indexes the contents of files? (or pretends to.)
Microsoft made NTFS, but not even Windows uses it properly. For example, the
:character is perfectly valid in NTFS file names, but not in Windows. If you mount an NTFS volume in Linux without specifying thewindows_namesoption, you can very easily make it unusable in Windows. It’s a sick joke, but nobody’s laughing.Hey, to be fair, ‘/’ and the null character are the only illegal character for file names on Linux (which is a blessing AND a curse)
This my top-used non-windows-component bestest utility for finding info on my pc. It’s da bomb!
Wizfile as an alternative to this which I prefer
Also Wiztree from the same devs as a WinDirStat alternative
Love them. Though, WizFile occasionally starts eating up a lot of CPU on my machine until I force close it.
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Also great is paint dot net which is a super advanced paint application that is borderline as good as photo shop, particularly when you add on all the community-created functionality.
Revo uninstaller is the first thing I put on a new machine before I delete all the bloatware that comes with a fresh install of windows. You would be surprised what is left over when you only use the built in ‘remove a program’ process.
Lastly, browser based but free and excellent, is sketch up, which is an architectural rendering application great for designing restaurants and retail spaces. A little bit of a learning curve but very smooth and functional once you get the hang of it.
Edit - VLC goes without saying right?
I’ve been using MPV instead of VLC for a few years now. I find it has more consistent support for a wider variety of files, though controlling it is a little harder and often requires you to look up keybinds (which to be fair I did all the time for VLC too).
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Not to pick an argument, but as a dev VSCodium has been a significantly better experience. It’s a good text editor, it’s got good search functionality, can be used as an IDE, and has good support through extensions.
And more of a shallow reason, it’s got much better dark mode support.
VeraCrypt – creating encrypted partitions/disks with easy manager. I am surprised I did not see anybody to mention it.
LUKS or fscrypt
Well !foss@beehaw.org and !linux@programming.dev for more, but off the top of my head:
Linux, VLC, FFMPEG, HandBrake, KDE (everything KDE), qBittorrent, Momentum (Flipper0 firmware), CHIRP, Vim, and more!
Ah yes, gotta download “Linux” for myself.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
How do you know they don’t refer to Alpine Linux?
Why are you interjecting to me?
It’s a copypasta
Sure, but why are they pasting it to me?
If you must know, it’s because I listed “Linux” rather than listing every distro by name, and your comment “oh I’ll just download linux” as if you can’t download a linux distro which is foss and based on the foss linux kernel, seemed just as pedantic to me as the copypasta, and so my immediate reaction, which I’d argue was natural and hilarious, was “haha copypasta time.”
But why male models?
Had to scroll THIS far to see FFMPEG? Shame, shame.
You’re so right about KDE, I didn’t realize just how much great stuff KDE makes until I was looking for a markdown editor this week at work, and KDE ghostwriter nails everything I ever wanted. Cross platform too so I can use it on my personal Linux machine too
yt-dlp can download videos from most sites. Comes with a lot of advanced features if you need them.
Greenshot
Irfanview
Audacity
OBS
Lab Chirp: simple but powerful sound effects generator
Stickies (zhorn software): Networkable sticky notes
Agent Ransack: File content search
Audacity
You may want to switch to Tenacity. Audacity was purchased by a company in 2021 that super promises not to try to sneak telemetry into the program. Again. For the third time.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity without any of that nonsense.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t updated my Audacity version since 2012 😅 but I’ll remember this thank you
Actual - Accounting/budgeting/etc
Wrote up a python script or three to handle parsing my bank CSV export files into an actually usable form, with automatic categorization, and so now I just do a periodic export and sync, and have all my financial records all in one place with some nice visualization, categorization, and budgeting features from Actual. It saves everything to a local sqlite db, so I can always jump ship to a different system if needed, and also itself provides a CSV export option.
10/10 software, would recommend
Davinci Resolve - Video Editing
Blender - 3D Modelling
Darktable - Photo Editing
Keira - Digital Art
Are some I use.
Not only is Resolve’s free version amazing, the paid version is even better. And it has a reasonable, one time, upfront cost that gives you lifetime access.
Np ++ is the GOAT. Stupidly fast to open, always restores everything you’ve ever typed no matter what, and the only program I’ve ever seen that actually lets you rename tabs where you haven’t saved the file first.
Sublime Text also lets you rename tabs without saving them, though the action is labeled “rename file”… But it’s also proprietary and paid, so that’s a downside for sure.
I got sick of fucking around with windows administrator tasks so I just wrote my own. It’s crude. It’s not pretty but I’m sick of having my job undermined by windows settings being forced on me.
Terminal based text editors are garbage in the eyes of most people
Notepad++ is the simplicity of notepad with a few extra features to make it exactly what most people neef
Micro-team checking in!
