Author Topic: 4 (Maybe more) Absolute top go-to programs (Read 42868 times)

TaoPhoenix · « **on:** April 30, 2014, 02:37 AM »

Just a thread to mention some programs that are absolutely at the top of your daily list that you'd be annoyed not to have around. The trap here is that second tier that are useful but only on occasion.

With a little work I came up with mine:

Taskbar Shuffle just sitting there. I shuffle my tabs around all day long.

That slightly unheard-of Non-NANY entry here Trandesk is a desktop splitter so you can hide some work on one tab and then later goof off on another tab without the cognitive load of 12 open browser windows and X tabs.
(It was buried in the C+ contest. There are many other splitters, but this one is good enough for me.)

Then Mouser's SC with his 1-click tweak he put in a while ago.

Into Tom Revell's Stickies. The trick is you bury the stickies on tab 4 of Trandesk, and whatever else useful junk like task manager and more. Notice the little green monitor is visible on all four tabs. And it all sits there. So you have an explosion of open stickies there. But on Trandesk nodes 1 and 2, you can make your few new important stickies. Node 3 is left for misc temporary experiments.

Yes, there's a minor problem if you reboot, you lose your Sticky placement. With a lot of work you can get it back. The easier way I do it is just re-open Trandesk, copy the image and make a new Sticky on tabs one and 2 and one day when you are bored you have two copies of it on Node 4 so you can delete one.

Whew!

It's not hard limited to 4 - just my method of narrowing down the supply of "useful stuff" to a flow that is absolutely at the top of your list. But the theme is stuff you absolutely use every day.

app103 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 30, 2014, 02:15 PM »

Without these my brain can not function:

DClock2
Notezilla

Without these, I can not work:

Notepad2
KeePass
Filezilla
Paintshop Pro
Pale Moon (replaces Firefox)
oDesk's time tracking software
Open Office
Screenshot Captor
Foxit Reader
Dropbox

Cloq · « **Reply #2 on:** April 30, 2014, 02:30 PM »

Total Command
Ad Muncher
Firefox
K-Lite Codec Pack (mega)
Office (2003)

Must have basics on any personal machines.

nm - read it wrong.. started to add others.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #3 on:** April 30, 2014, 03:43 PM »

Pale Moon

Browser Bunch, which launches PM with my startup sites

Transpose, a potpourri of hotkeys active in editors and browsers, examples.. control t to transpose 2 characters left of the caret, press shift key while left mouse button down in browser copies selection to clipboard, control F9 looks up word left of caret in The Free Dictionary etc..

EditPad Lite 7, very nice free text editor

MoveIt, my hotkey window positioning/moving utility

and of course I always have FARR running.

rgdot · « **Reply #4 on:** April 30, 2014, 04:00 PM »

1 only ;-)

Lynx (switch from Firefox)

tomos · « **Reply #5 on:** April 30, 2014, 05:12 PM »

-rgdot (April 30, 2014, 04:00 PM)

looks interesting

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #6 on:** April 30, 2014, 05:16 PM »

Heh well for some reason I felt the browsers were "too obvious" but yeah I've been doing the Pale Moon Firefox shuffle for years now.

Some other cool notes though.

Shades · « **Reply #7 on:** April 30, 2014, 05:50 PM »

Directory Opus
Notepad++
Foxit Reader
Process Explorer

Never leave home without these.

mwb1100 · « **Reply #8 on:** April 30, 2014, 06:41 PM »

Pale Moon (I'm a recent convert - though I'd like to customize the icon to be orange like FF so I can spot it easier)
Notepad2
STDU Reader (again - I have to change the icon in this to be Adobe's PDF icon so I can find the program easier)
Outlook (ducks for cover)

What's with all the nondescript bluish icons that seem to be more and more popular nowadays?

rgdot · « **Reply #9 on:** April 30, 2014, 07:13 PM »

-rgdot (April 30, 2014, 04:00 PM)

looks interesting
-tomos (April 30, 2014, 05:12 PM)

TreeProjects
XYplorer
Firefox (may change, we shall see)
CintaNotes

MilesAhead · « **Reply #10 on:** May 01, 2014, 09:14 AM »

I guess I should have added AutoHotkey.

Renegade · « **Reply #11 on:** May 01, 2014, 09:36 AM »

MS Office
ALShow
Keepass
VMware
Screenshot Captor
Editplus
Putty
cgminer, pooler cpuminer (etc.)
Bitcoin-qt, Huntercoin-qt, Litecoin-qt, Dogecoin-qt, etc.
Visual Studio

And many more.

cyberdiva · « **Reply #12 on:** May 01, 2014, 09:43 AM »

I tried to limit this to 4, but I wound up with 7:

Directory Opus
HyperSnap
Pale Moon
Launchbar Commander
Active Words
ClipCache (after years of loving ClipMate)
Linkman

Added: three more I really can't do without are Everything Search, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Pro, and File Locator Pro (though the freeware version Agent Ransack is also good)

joiwind · « **Reply #13 on:** May 01, 2014, 10:02 AM »

Pale Moon (I'm a recent convert - though I'd like to customize the icon to be orange like FF so I can spot it easier)
-mwb1100 (April 30, 2014, 06:41 PM)

Install Stratiform and you can change the colours.

tomos · « **Reply #14 on:** May 01, 2014, 10:35 AM »

mention some programs that are absolutely at the top of your daily list that you'd be annoyed not to have around
-TaoPhoenix (April 30, 2014, 02:37 AM)

using that criteria (and not in any particular order):

FARR
Gridmove and Milesahead's MoveIt for windows management (hey Miles, what's you new site address again?)
Syncovery for backup
Directory Opus
CintaNotes (although I do want to check out alternatives)
Listary - (happily used Filebox Extender for years until it was no longer supported)
Clipboard: Mouser's CHS; (I liked Tranglos's Ethervane Echo a lot too, but it clashed with some old software I had installed)

40hz · « **Reply #15 on:** May 01, 2014, 12:56 PM »

Back when I was still mostly using Windows (I've since moved over to the universe next door) they were:

WriteMonkey - the quintessential "no distraction" text editor
XYplorer - excellent tabbed file manager. I bought the Pro edition to support the product even though I didn’t really need or want the relatively small number of additional features it provided over the free edition. This developer has been most generous with his freebie releases.
Outline 4D - the sui generis outliner for Windows. Fairly expensive, but well worth it if you have use for this sort of app. Fellow DCer dr_andus did an article on it which can be found on his blog here. (Most excellent blog too! Be sure to check it out!)
Tomahawk Gold - powerful and inexpensive fully featured "old style" wordprocessor for people who really loved the look and feel of Word 2000. A "Platinum Edition" had been announced back in 2012. But it seems development has stalled since then.
Microsoft Excel - if you need a powerful spreadsheet, this is the one everybody else uses - and you probably should too.
CintaNotes Pro- your basic junk drawer quick note taker/half-assed organizer. An inexpensive ($25) "Pro" version with some very useful extra features is also available. (I used the pro version.)
Sage - FF extension. IMHO the only RSS/Atom reader worth considering. Light on its feet - and even lighter on features - which I consider its biggest selling point. Most RSS readers are bloated with features you'll never use. If you just want to efficiently stay on top of your newsfeeds, this is the reader to try first.
ScrapBook - FF extension. Simple (some would say "primitive") web page grabber. If you need more features than ScrapBook, bite the bullet and shell out $79 for Surfulater.
FileZilla - got access to FTP servers? Get FileZilla.
gPodder - multiplatform (always a big plus) podcast catcher. If you subscribe to several podcasts like I do, this app will handle everything for you.
KeePass - (note spelling - not the same thing as KeyPass) - handy no-frill local drive password vault. Support included for use with remote storage providers such as DropBox.
PuTTY - a (very!) basic SSH/TTY client. If you use SSH you'll definitely want a client. PuTTY is one. There are now many newer and more feature-rich alternatives which are well worth considering. I mostly stuck to PuTTY out of force of habit. And because I knew it inside out. If I were looking for an SSH client today, I'd consider one of PuTTY's more modern successors. List of alternatives here.

Note: some of these programs are available in "no install" or "portable" versions that can be run from a USB key. FWIW, I will always use a portable version of an app if one is available. But that's me.

Jibz · « **Reply #16 on:** May 01, 2014, 01:07 PM »

Four I tend to use much and would have a hard time without:

Total Commander - my muscle memory from NC makes this the fastest for me
"A good text editor", which has been Sublime Text for the past year, though currently replaced by Vim
SourceTree (and by extension, Mercurial and Git)
Listary - mainly for the find as you type and disk search

(I've left out things like browsers, e-mail client, and compilers here).

And four from the second tier:

CrashPlan - luckily not actively "using" it much, but it quietly keeps my files backed up
Evernote - mainly for website clipping, I use Google Keep quick notes
KeePass, though also increasingly LastPass for websites
f.lux - you don't really notice it much until you try turning it off at night

Honorable mention to Ad Muncher and WinPatrol.

myarmor · « **Reply #17 on:** May 03, 2014, 04:16 AM »

Mine would be:
Directory Opus 11 - Advanced filemanager that can be scripted using Active Scripting engines (VBScript, JScript and more).
EditPad Pro - The best syntax editor I know about to date. The downside is that it doesn't have scripting (although it can record/play macros).
PowerGrep - Advanced textmanipulation tool using regexes.
RegexBuddy - Creating and testing regexes.

K-Lite Codec Pack mega
PFrank - Free multi-regex renamer. Can also use predefined commands, assorted tags etc.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #18 on:** May 03, 2014, 08:22 AM »

Great lists gang!

Dirhael · « **Reply #19 on:** May 03, 2014, 12:42 PM »

Directory Opus (no other file manager even comes close, and I've got licenses for several others I've tried over the years).
Sublime Text (best text editor on *any* platform! Easily worth the asking price).
JRiver Media Center (I've got this running pretty much 24/7 on a secondary monitor. Deals with large media libraries better than most).
Firefox (my go-to browser used to be Opera, but then they went and made that Chrome-shell-thing, so yeah..).
Mailbird (pretty email programs doesn't not live exclusively on OSX any longer).
Steam (what use are my twin Titans without something to do

).
PuTTY (manage servers).

app103 · « **Reply #20 on:** May 04, 2014, 04:04 AM »

Sage - FF extension. IMHO the only RSS/Atom reader worth considering. Light on its feet - and even lighter on features - which I consider its biggest selling point. Most RSS readers are bloated with features you'll never use. If you just want to efficiently stay on top of your newsfeeds, this is the reader to try first.
-40hz (May 01, 2014, 12:56 PM)

Or you can try NewsFox, which is the RSS reader that is included in K-Meleon.

40hz · « **Reply #21 on:** May 04, 2014, 05:05 AM »

Sage - FF extension. IMHO the only RSS/Atom reader worth considering. Light on its feet - and even lighter on features - which I consider its biggest selling point. Most RSS readers are bloated with features you'll never use. If you just want to efficiently stay on top of your newsfeeds, this is the reader to try first.
-40hz (May 01, 2014, 12:56 PM)

Or you can try NewsFox, which is the RSS reader that is included in K-Meleon.
-app103 (May 04, 2014, 04:04 AM)

Thx for the suggestion. I will check it out.

UPDATE: Oops...32-bit only? And no Nix version? Dual showstopper for me. Oh well...

yksyks · « **Reply #22 on:** May 05, 2014, 08:02 AM »

Almost can't live without these (in the following order):

ZTreeWin — file manager
HotkeyP — keyboard shortcuts
Ditto — clipboard manager
Everything — finding files

To feel better I also need (but not that urgently):
Dropbox
Evernote

Curt · « **Reply #23 on:** May 07, 2014, 04:03 PM »

... programs that are absolutely at the top of your daily list that you'd be annoyed not to have around. The trap here is that second tier that are useful but only on occasion.
-TaoPhoenix (April 30, 2014, 02:37 AM)

1 only: Lynx (switch from Firefox) http://lynx.isc.org/ https://en.wikipedia...rg/wiki/Lynx_browser
-rgdot (April 30, 2014, 04:00 PM)

-were you trapped ("useful but only on occasion")? How can a text browser ever be "at the top of your daily list"? It's not even able to really tell what it looks like itself, because it cannot display pictures!! Also, extremely many pages on the Internet will not make sense if "displayed" in Lynx. It must be used for something other than the "normal" Internet. This browser is a complete mystery to me.

----------

Almost all of my favourite programs from the past have been abandoned, so I guess my favourites of the present also may be abandoned some time in the future - so what if I like (FastStone Capture) this (Pale Moon) or that (jetAudio was updated!!) program (Dynamic-Photo HDR 5)? Tomorrow will be a different story.

cyberdiva · « **Reply #24 on:** May 07, 2014, 04:35 PM »

Almost all of my favourite programs from the past have been abandoned, so I guess my favourites of the present also may be abandoned some time in the future - so what if I like (FastStone Capture) this (Pale Moon) or that (jetAudio was updated!!) program (Dynamic-Photo HDR 5)? Tomorrow will be a different story.
-Curt (May 07, 2014, 04:03 PM)

Wow, Curt. Sounds like you've had a bad day/week/month.

Yes, it's true that nothing lasts for ever, but that's no reason not to enjoy programs while they're useful and no reason not to be interested in what other people like. And for that matter, I've continued to find some programs very useful for a decade or more. HyperSnap and I go back 17 years; there almost never a day that I'm at my computer without using it. Mulberry is still my primary email client after 14 years of use (in spite of my trying unsuccessfully to find a more modern replacement). UltraEdit has been my default text editor for about the same amount of time. Someone turned me on to ActiveWords ten years ago, and I still use it every day. Carpe ~~diem~~ program.