• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Programs you can't do without

Radmin - Like PC anywhere but much cheaper for a big install base and performs better.

BootIT - A little known mulitboot/partioning/imageing-cloning tool. I used it to set up multiboot lab machines for my developement monkies. 35 completely seperate OS installs each on their own partition on a single disk, with the ability to restore a partition from an image file without any outside media. The best $30 utility I ever bought. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com

CommView - Packet sniffer, one of the friendliest.

Winrar - cuz it beats the hell out of winzip

Stanley 20 oz. Jacketed Graphite Hammer - Makes even the most stubborn computer problems go away. Also works on nails, mice, cockroaches and junior techs.
 
Yahweh said:
Homesite 5.0, its a HTML coding program. Its not a WYSIWYG, its your standard tedious "I type all my own code" program. All the HTML tags are color-coded, and it has a feature that automatically completes most tags as you type them. It also lets you organize your folders and documents into different projects, and it has a neat built in game (the game is an Easter Egg).

GIF Construction Set Professional is also an important program. Its a very easy program to use, it lets me create animated GIFs and GIFs with transparency.

PalTalk, without PalTalk I wouldnt get to listen to MoeFaux use foul language in that wonderful kittenish voice of hers. PalTalk is a good lot of fun.
Click to expand...

I'll have to second the vote for Homesite. Best code editor for web languages I've used to date. Though I have a fondness for BBEdit on that "other" platform. Dreamweaver is a bloated, overdone piece of junk, but I still use it to quickly prototype a UI.

A little shareware goodie called TypeItIn that I use while coding has saved me hours of tedious typing. For instance, you can script it to cut the selected text and paste it into a document.write(), or generate named and dated comment starters and on and on.

TOAD for Oracle is awesome and completely worth the steep price if you have to do much work with an Oracle database. If I had to go back to hand coding SQL, I think I'd shoot myself. I've also been able to use it to generate extremely complex queries in minutes for reports and so forth that would have taken me hours to figure out without this tool. Sadly, it only works with Oracle.

Photoshop and ImageReady are my image editors of choice.


Edited because I can't spell anything with a Q in it :D
 
From Unix land here, I'll have to nominate:

cvs - invaluable when programming, and useful for many other sundry tasks too (keeping track of configuration files, for instance)

grep - simply necessary for any serious file-handling

find - same as with grep

screen - a "window manager" for console-based programs - especially useful when used through ssh

Buzz Electronic Notebook - best simple ToDo list program I've seen.

Emacs - Some hate it, some love it (and a lot of people don't know what it is). I love it.
 
A friend just pointed me at spacemonger - which does a neat graphic display of disk space in windows. I like.

On unix emacs was nice but I could always rely on finding vi. Speaking of which
"Hallo! My name is sendmail.cf. You kill my process. Prepare to vi"
 
Leif's mention of Unix utilities reminded me of one I've written: epiName. It allows you to rename files using pattern matching. The replacement names can take substrings from the matched names. If anyone wants it, just holler. It only runs on PCs.

~~ Paul
 
openoffice.org

Free office suite. Sweet.

Windows/Unix(Linux) flavors/Mac Os X. If you have a computer, this will probably work on it.

mozilla.org
Less annoying than IE, more features than others, but available for lots and lots of platforms.

ANY old command line interpreter!

Whatever it is, a CLI is still way better than a GUI for so many things. As long as I can download a few little extra gadgets from the unix world, and press 'tab' for file completions, I'll be in there more than the desktop. Rarely do I NOT have a command prompt blinking at me. Usually more than one.

Scripts/batches are your friends, and pure joy to apply to repetitive tasks and problems. It's like solving a puzzle game to do work instead of just doing work!

vim (VI iMproved)

I've grown to love this contraption. I once used micro-emacs on the Atari ST, but this is just smoother and easier. Especially vi/vim are available and usually installed on just about everything.

sed

Sed is a stream editor - a useful gadget which supplements grep nicely for search/replace tasks. "sed s/from/to/g" would translate every instance of "from" to "to" in a stream, and it does regular expression scripts and magic. Basically, this is what vi invokes when you type ":1,$s/from/to" at its command line.

Code: 
ls | sed "s/\(.*\)/convert \1/">convert

dir /b | sed "s/\(.*\)/convert \1/">convert.bat

Either of the above will generate a script/batch to invoke some conversion on a list of files. Though under unix/linux the top one needs a "chmod +x convert" to run. There are hundreds of web sites dedicated to wacky little things that can be done with sed.

(YES! I know there are simpler ways under UNIX to do the above example... but not necessarily under a DOS-like shell.)

Doing repetitive sed things to files is what made converting a big project in BLISS-16 to C achievable. OK, I could've done it by hand, but I would have been way beyond postal halfway through the process.
 
BBEdit for text files/HTML.
Photoshop/ImageReady
Spark for audio editing.
iTunes
Fink Commander for Unix installs and source file compiling.
GraphicConverter
 
I would have to say Perl.

Sure it's ugly, and it isn't my platform of choice for developing real programs, but there are so many hacks that I wouldn't think of trying to do if it weren't for Perl.
 
vi, xchat, and mozilla; the 3 i use daily

keeps me happy, guess i couldnt do much without openssh either

apt-get is kinda essential for me, i have some older redhat boxen at work that fetch updates with it, my debian ultrasparc2 system runs it daily

gnumeric has helped me keep track of all of my IP blocks, its a nice spreadsheet

recently i started using evolution 1.4 for email, as i get tons of postmaster/hostmaster/root email, it let me setup filters quickly so i can sort easily

vnc has made my life easier by leaps and bounds, right now i just got in 4 suns (running good old slowwwwwwlaris) that don't have vid cards but are running gnome2 via Xvnc, since i dont have 5 hours to figure out patchpro, i just use netscape to download sun patches (they still preinstall solaris 8 which has like 200 public patches, one of which doesnt install because it has a broken dependency, makes windows update look like red carpet)
 
I always carry these programs through upgrades and carry most of them around on a few memory sticks.

Opera -- Excellent web browser. I've been using it since before version 3, and I tell everyone to use it as well.

Master Converter -- Unit converter for a large variety of units. Allows you to make your own categories and conversions.

Scanner An excellent little utility that shows you drive consumption in a clickable concentric pie chart. Never seen anything else like it.

Rname-It -- The best, most powerful Windows mass-file-renamer I've ever used. Everything else I've tried has outright sucked in comparison.

Winamp -- Duh.

Zoom Player -- Unbloated, fast, and highly customizable media & DVD player. You'll never want to use Media Player again.

Kerio Personal Firewall -- Tired of Zone Alarm going nuts and forgetting your settings or preventing something from working no matter what you do? Get Kerio instead.

Spybot Search & Destroy -- Use IE? You sure better be using this!

Ad-Aware -- Use IE? You sure better be using this!

HiJack This & CWShredder -- Use IE? You sure better be using these!

Agent -- Simply the best Windows newsgroup reader, hands down.

Bit Torrent -- A "Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?" tool for true peer-peer file distribution. Take the loads off of a handful of servers and spread it among everyone who's downloading the same file.

Dismount -- Ragdolls, brutality, and fun!
 
Trillian - Because AIM is an insidious whore
AvantBrowser - A browser that uses IE, but makes it actually useful, lots of quick and easy shortcuts, better than Mozilla IMHO
PowerArchiver - If there's a file and it's compressed or needs to be compressed, this utility will do it. It make WinZip and WinRar utterly obsolete.
Winamp - Because the RIAA can suck eggs.
DivX - because free movies are good.
DaemonTools - Because free games are good.
Nero - Because hard copies of free stuff is good.
DC++ - A P2P agent that gives me an average 700 kb/s download of any file imaginable. (Note: I have a T3 connection)
 
Mozilla Firebird - Mozilla.org's little brother. I like it because it's ONLY a browser and nothing more, and the use of extensions lets me control what features I want.

Thunderbird - email program from the makers of Mozilla. Pretty much no-frills, just how I like my mail programs.

Winamp - I think most of us know what this is.

CDex - freeware cd ripper/audio format conversion tool.

mIRC - I must have my chat.

irfanview - a freeware image viewer and basic editor, which can view just about any format I've ever heard of.

Crimson Edit - freeware text editor with tabs, sorta like UltraEdit.

Huey - an html color thingie. Punch in some color codes and it will show you what the color looks like. Also has sliders and a color picker.
 
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