Scott Hanselman's 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows (hanselman.com) 65
Scott Hanselman: Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, "util" means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb. Many/most are free some aren't. Those that aren't free are very likely worth your 30-day trial, and very likely worth your money. These are all well loved and oft-used utilities. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them. No one paid money to be on this list and no money is accepted to be on this list.
There's only one utility you need (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: There's only one utility you need (Score:1)
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If only for Fancy Zones on an ultra-wide monitor, it is useful.
Re: There's only one utility you need (Score:5, Funny)
The laughable part was at "Ultimate developer" followed by "Windows". The rest was just a repetition of the same joke.
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Cute. You work in Silicon Valley being a millionaire who gets to pick which OS he wants for a .com with 20 years experience on your resume. Meanwhile, real people live in the real world and use what their IT department hands out with Dells and HPs and if you do not like developing on Windows then the door is right there as they were find someone else who will be happy to get paid. Especially in this economy.
Every developer but 1 I ever met uses Windows exclusively. It's what the boss tells them to use.
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Absolutely. I mean who in the business world and in I.T. departments uses the most widely used OS for 98% of all personal computers.
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"Power tools for Windows": very laughable
Windows needs power tools for the same reason as old bathroom floors: for dismantling the mouldy pile of crap.
That's #1 on his list (Score:3)
The number one thing on the list of tools linked is WSL2, Linux running aside Windows.
WSL2 is full Linux and it's pretty cool, if your work requires Windows.
Re: That's #1 on his list (Score:1)
> requires Windows
Why would you work for the losing competitor in the market though? ;)
"Everyone collects utilities"... (Score:5, Funny)
10 to 15 years ago, I'd be all ears... (Score:3, Interesting)
... but now?
Heck, no.
I love the fact that the first one on the list is *nix on windows - says it all.
The second? - a better terminal experience. A little late to the party for windows, but hey...
Microsoft devs should be applauded for the inroads they have made - of that there is no doubt. There's some really cool stuff happening.
However, the fact remains, that the underlying OS is a shambles - it's a bloated mess because of all the bloat that's shunted on top of it.
It is a nightmare to keep up to date. It is a nightmare to keep the damn OS quiet for power users - you have to jump through hundreds of hoops to make it less annoying.
That reminds me of one of my favourite sites back in the days when I was a windows user - annoyances.org I believe it was - the domain now sold.
A site dedicated to calming down windows and making it usable.
I'm pretty much OS agnostic - or I was - until the direction of travel by microsoft started to grate on me.
Everything on the OS is opt-out - a vanilla install takes absolutely ages to "train" to remove a plethora of privacy sucking crap settings - and even then, in many cases, those settings can be reverted by microsoft in the next update.
Ah updates - this is the light sucking vortex at the centre of all the ills of windows. An almighty cluster fuck.
You do NOT control your computer. You CANNOT control the updates. You WILL have to install and reboot. It WILL happen at the most inconvenient times.
As an agnostic, I still use windows for gaming. I tried Linux again recently. It is getting better, but I don't have the patience to be fucking around with proton and vulkan drivers to get 70% of the performance with 30% of the graphical settings missing and the chance of a random crash.
I use macOS as my primary OS - because I'm both a creative (music) and a coder.
I use Linux everywhere else.
In fairness to Linux and gaming (Score:2)
... as mentioned in my ramble above, I once again tried Linux as a gaming machine.
Don't get me wrong, it was pretty damn awesome.
A great deal of the games I tried worked as well as on windows if not better, but some of titles I'm currently playing - hit and miss.
I'm stoked that it *is* a really viable option - heck, it has been for ages - and I fully expect within a few years, it will absolutely be a premium choice.
Valve started pumping it (excuse the pun) - they've kinda fallen off the rails with it, but a
Re: In fairness to Linux and gaming (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the same core problem we had with Internet Explorer 6.
In told them: Opera/Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox is so miuch better.
But web site businesses told me: I won't develop for something nobody's using.
And users told me: I won't install something that works on no site.
(Even though it wasn't the browser's fault the site wasn't standards-compliant.)
In the end, it was only through Google declaring the end of IE6 support, MS being convicted more often than a gang member, and Firefox's logo looking cute, that the monopoly was broken.
Little did we know at the time, that Google only did it, to establish its own IE-style monopoly and kill everything else too.
Moral of the story: It takes a lot of strong voices to generate pressure away from it, something attractive to go towards, and that one guy that is too valuable to ignore, to openly declare he's changing sides.
Valve tried to be that one guy. But wasn't dominant enough. Close, but no cigar.
So you and me have to keep applying pressure, and at least appear as Linux users in their statistics. We also need to tell people about Linux's attractiveness. But that is, frankly, as solved problem.
And then we need to get another big game publisher to fall in love with the idea.
The way I see it, it is our job to make that happen.
And the key thing we need here, is a unique selling point. Something that Windows can never and will never give *game publishers*, and thar is very useful to them.
Do you see any?
I see privacy, power and modifiability as its key benefits. All things game publishers actively want to destroy due to their thug business model where they manage to take in money without working for it, after the actual work jas all long been paid off, for all eternity.
Maybe game publishers simply need to die a horrible death with it. ;)
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Google ending IE5 support happened long after everyone switched over to FF. About 15 years ago FF simply started working better on poorly made sites than IE did, then you saw a proliferation of small sites all only offering support for FF. I doubt that Google was the only major internet site around that time that stopped supporting it.
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There is a way to take some control over that, but it requires you to write a program (it can probably be done in PowerShell, but I've done it in C# because I know that a lot better) which every hour uses the Windows Management API to change your office hours by one hour so that it's always office hours and never a "good time" to reboot. That way my work machin
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Why not just set a policy to not reboot without permission? Much simpler.
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Well, sure, but it seems your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of doing this - a registry change, but one that can easily be overwritten again by windows. ... an update.
That's the problem here - quite often, when it comes to update settings, Microsoft can simply wipe your settings - generally when there's
But hey, I don't care too much anymore, I probably boot into windows once every few weeks to do some gaming and have to remember, to check what updates it has lined up for me *before* starting a game -
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Well yes, if it were just a registry setting. That is why you make it a policy. So far Microsoft has never "buggered" with policies by changing them as part of an update, even local policies. So when you *do* reboot after an update then even if Microsoft buggered with the setting itself, the policy puts it back the way you intended. Unless the "update" buggers with the policy then this will always work.
On the plus side, if Microsoft were to start buggering with policies they will face massive lawsuits a
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I am pretty sure for about a year a short while ago Windows used to allow the "update and shutdown" command in the power menu, so that you could update your computer at the end of the day when you were no longer using it. But for some reason they went back to the, "you must sit in front of the computer and watch it update" model.
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I still see "Update and shutdown" (although it only half-updates it: the other half happens when you start it up again). The ways of Microsoft are too mysterious for mere mortals.
Re: 10 to 15 years ago, I'd be all ears... (Score:1)
Which MacOS enforces updates too. So does your Roku device, cell phone, car stereo etc.
By using Linux you take away your own rights to run Office, Adobe products, QuickBooks, AutoCAD, or about anything you use to earn a living. Unless you're a Unix admin or some Cloud architect I see no value in using it unless you just browse websites. Flame me all you want but computers are not cool anymore. Cell phones are.
At the end of the day people run apps. Not operating systems. They also have better things to do li
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You are making an assumption that everyone uses computers in the same way you do and uses the same applications that you do.
And as for "computers not being cool anymore, cellphones are" - a "cellphone" *is* a computer.
Guess what, the most popular platform, Android, is Linux based.
I'll agree we are seeing a blurring of the lines between "traditional"? desktop/laptop computers and mobile devices, to the point where there is a convergence toward a unified OS. We're not there yet, but it's a logical conclusion
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I agree. This is like saying the first thing to upgrade on a Toyota Prius is to bolt a pickup truck on top of it. Just use the damn pickup truck directly and skip the Prius.
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The bomb? (Score:1)
"If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb"
I must just be getting too old to keep up with all the adolescent hipster speak. Presumably he doesn't worship the H Bomb and "the bomb" is just the latest in daft alternative phrases for "great"? If it is, thats just bad. Or maybe sick?
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Actually, "it's the bomb" is extremely old teen speak, probably three if not four decades old.
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The phrase was common in the 90s. In 1994, Kris Kross recorded a rap song titled Da Bomb [wikipedia.org].
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Never heard it, but then I'm not american. Perhaps it was a US colloquialism.
Re: The bomb? (Score:1)
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"The bomb dot com" would have been the correct usage here, since it's a tech site.
But the first 10 seconds of this [youtube.com] should give you some guideposts on the era it's from. It quit being hip around the same time Monica Lewinski's blue dress was soiled.
*ba-dum TISS* (Score:3, Informative)
I genuinely laughed at the last two words.
Are half of those tools gonna be "How do I wrestle control back to me?" and the other half "Basic tools that are considered expected outside of consumer OSes"? ;-D
Just do it already. You're a pro. Don't accept mediocrity. You know what I mean.
Snide remarks aside, it's not a bad list (Score:2)
I've all but given up on Windows (Ubuntu is my main OS followed by OSX and then very reluctantly Windows 10 for legacy issues - I still keep a Windows 7 system up and running and to that first) but this isn't a bad list of applications for new developers/users that want to do more on their Windows systems than play games, surf the web and write emails.
I've used several of the tools listed here (Paint.net, WinDirStat, Github Desktop, Markdown Monster) for years and while there are a few I'd quibble over (I'm
Cygwin and you are done (Score:5, Informative)
One thing I buy is Visual Slick Edit because I can't stand the UI of msdev. Takes so long to open sln files, and tagging and symbol building is slow and limited in scope. Slick edit collects the entire windows work space, so nicely.
Windows workstation, six desktops, one for email and browsing, one for local development, one for windows server 0.5 TB machine RDT, one for linux team server 1TB machine TurboVNC, one for the new local testing machine 256GB Windows RDT.
Several dozen cygwin command windows, several slick edit windows .... thats my regular work environment.
I tried 42 inch 4K monitor, did not like it. Looking side to side is ok, but moving head up and down is a pain in the neck, literally. 48 inch 3840 x 1080 screen gives me 84 dpi compared to 92 dpi on a 42" 4K. I like 48 inch ultrawide better than the 4K.
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Yuck. Cygwin I found was horrible and I am surprised people still use it. Give me a real package manager or give me death. I found to get anything to work well or compile was difficult but I ran it over 15 years ago. WSL is amazing in comparison. Just apt-get install X. Done.
Just because it's by Microsoft doesn't make WSL bad which is why I think so many people stick with Cygwin. Of course in 2020 you can get 8 core and even 16 core cpus wtih 32 to 64 gigs of ram and accelerated ssd and nvme storage for che
I have to agree (Score:3)
I've done the git bash thing - which makes it PRETTY good. Especially for sshing into full Linux boxes.
But on my personal machine....(I've run pure Linux box before)....if you HAVE to run windows....then I fire up a VM (VirtualBox or one of the others)...share a drive and then I can do my real work in Linux.
At least he knows his file managers (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't especially like his suggestions for dual-pane file managers (although I agree that dual-pane is a must) - personally I much prefer Total Commander which is the total Swiss knife, and integrates seamlessly with the mentioned excellent TeraCopy. The TC bulk file renamer is a bliss, the icon toolbar serves are a replacement start menu and it has a multitude of plugins that allow from reading linux filesystems (Diskinternals reader) to reading the storage and installing apps on your smartphone (ADB plugin). Also, minus five points for not mentioning HDSentinel.
I'd like to add one little known tool that I constantly use when setting up new (mostly refurbished) PCs. My workflow is installing the OS as a VM and converting it from virtual to physical. There are two solutions for the job, booting the VM with a Clonezilla ISO, or writing directly the vmdk to the physical disk using vmdk2phys (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmdk2phys). vmdk2phys also does P2V. All is needed afterwards is expanding the OS partition, plugging the new disk in the target PC and letting the OS install the drivers. Manually install the devices that remain unrecognized and you're all setup. This workflow suits me because a) 90% of the job is done on my main fast PC; b) I install all the programs the customer needs on the VM; c) I don't need to write USBs or CDs or wait for a slow PC/laptop to install the OS and programs; and d) The same ready-made OS VMs can be used for a new customer.
This is not a suggestion thread but since I'm at it, I could also humbly suggest FloatLED (excellent small disk activity indicator for those who have their PC on the floor), DefaultProgramsEditor (because Windoze constantly change file associations), DriverStoreExplorer for troubleshooting driver problems, USBDeview for USB devices. Evidently my choices reflect a hardware point of view and not a developer one.
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Setup MDT (works from network and USB, you can PXE boot or boot from USB and still use network).
You keep 1 base image up to date, you can add drivers by Model in a folder structure that automatically get detected and installed. Its a little setup, but once its done, adding a new machine is just a case of adding a few drivers. Generally I would just insta
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Thanks for the tip, I know professional tools like MDT exist, but deploying new installations is not my main job. Also I don't know whether MDT still supports the deprecated OSs of Windows 98, Win XP and Win7, which I still have to deploy/repair in my uni to support old measurement systems with ISA cards etc.
I just happen to know VMware pretty well and take great pleasure when my DIY workflows just work. Can MDT deploy linux OSs, which I also do for the uni (but the OP was about Windows tools) and for distr
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The best file manager for Windows is Directory Opus. It's not free but it goes way beyond dual pane and is worth every penny for heavy users.
Started out as an Amiga application, I've been using it since the 90s.
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I'm aware about Opus, it's very good. TC is nagware but we bought one license in about 1990 or earlier, which still works (portable installation of course) and I literally can't live without it. I have not checked the latest Opus releases but I don't expect it to differ from TC featurewise more than 2-5%. Will check.
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Opus is on another level in terms of Windows integration and scriptability, for example.
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What do you use to expand the partition and the filesystem after VM2physical ?
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A good option is Double Commander [sourceforge.io]. Cross-platform, free software, fast and lightweight.
Scott's Utilities (Score:1)
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No virtual desktop manager? (Score:2)
I am still looking for anything that comes close to the fwvmPager. On Win7, there was WindowsPager, clearly inspired by FVWM, but on Win10 all I have looked at are either crap or unsupported.
Huh. (Score:2)
Huh. So you ... collect utilities.
That is a thing. It seems.
(looks around, frightened) Do we ... do we all do this? Let's see some hands, here.
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I have, at present, 630 utilities in my utilities directory -- the earliest being dated 1994 and the latest just yesterday. I do not consider most of the things in the OP list to be utilities, but rather applications.
Portable applications (Score:2)
Applications and utilities that you can run directly from an external flash drive or SSD (such as portable apps [portableapps.com]) are very helpful:
EclipseCDT with OpenJDK and minGW64 (Score:2)
I put together a portable installation of Eclipse, using OpenJDK, the CDT Eclipse add-on for C/C++ and minGW64 supplying gcc. Weighs in a little over a gigabyte and fits and runs nicely on a thumb drive.
It took a lot of hacking. For starters, you need to install Eclipse from their .zip because there are install configurations mess with the Registry, all for what, saving a step in the install? The OpenJDK is relative-directory-local to Eclipse, so it doesn't mess with whatever Java install you have on
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+10. This is what knowledgeable users do and TFA totally missed the opportunity to mention it. Keep the OS on a small SSD and forever lean & mean - zero or minimal registry involvement. Have all apps in portable form (and user data) on a different disk. Open source apps and several utilities' devs know we exist and offer portable versions. Even commercial apps run better in portable format (if you know what I mean). No background processes when the app is not running, no useless.notification area icons.
Most Necessary Tool is Missing (Score:1)
The most necessary thing if you are forced to use Windows is ClassicShell.
It gets rid of the most horrid feature of Windows since Windows 2000 -- the useless and ugly Fisher-Price User Interface which has been going downhill at an every increasing speed with every release and update.
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It's called Open Shell these days, Bew developers. But if you are acustomed to a particular kind of menu, you can tell CS to use that form, eg classic, xp, 7, whatever. PinMenu is good too for lesser or always available menu options.
Tip. Put a link to opening 'open shell', somewhere accessable from the desktop (even in a folder under there). It's handy restarting it.
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No. Why would one want to apply an "update" that provides no tangible benefit to something that works just peachy fine? That is the sort of insane asshole practice that created the SolarWindows fiasco. There are quite a lot of persons who "update" just because "updates" and they usually end up getting their just desserts.
How do people even find good freeware? (Score:2)
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I think it helps to have the free time and naivety of youth. I still use the utilities I found in highschool.
"worth your money" (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of prices seemed geared specifically for corporate silicon billionaires running companies funded by investors, where the employee already costs 200 an hour so the price of the software doesn't matter.
I occasionally think to myself that, I have been using this indispensable piece of software for decades, I should actually pay for it. This thought always ends when seeing that the software sells for $80 a month for a licence.
Much of the utilities industry seems to run off the idea that if they price the software high enough, 1 out of every 100 people will still buy it and make it profitable.
Notpad++, Rename Master, Agent Ransack, PDF-XChang (Score:4, Interesting)
Notpad++: I know all you nerds probably use VIM or EMACs, but a normal mouse based text editor, that takes up notepad levels of resources, with the power of an IDE is a must have.
Rename Master: Sometimes you just need to rename a dozen files. And from full regex support to a simpler gui based method, rename master has it all.
Agent Ransack: Somehow this non-indexing file searching utility seems to search files at about the same speed as ones that take hours to setup and get working.
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That said, came here for comments, leaving satisfied.