Well-written software can be life-changing… Well, that’s a bit much, but if you spend as much time in front of a monitor as I do, it can be time-saving at least.
Here’s a few packages I don’t leave home without. Literally — they’re on an Iomega Micro-mini USB Drive that’s attached to my keychain. I’m lusting after the 1GB version so I can put a full-on cygwin distribution on it.
Utilities
- ASpell (GNU spell checker)
- AutoHotKey (amazing hot-key utility)
- exuberant ctags (custom-compiled with regex support)
- GNU Win32 Utilities (native ports of unix-like command-line utils)
- Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0 filter (gets rid of narsty Office-specific tags from HTML)
- rmempty (removes empty directories)
- Roboform (well, my data, at least).
- Sizer (resizes any window to a custom width x height)
- SmartTab (alt-tab replacement that SHOULD be built into all future MS operating systems)
- Vim (the one true editor)
- xplorer2 (dual-paned explorer replacement — worth buying)
Browsers
- FireFox setup
- Lynxw32 (text-based web browser (it comes in handy))
- Maxthon setup (think tabbed Internet Explorer replacement with plugins)
Languages
- ActiveState Perl setup
- BeanShell jars and docs
Needless to say, I’m a command-line junkie.