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Sharing a list of software that I find pretty useful and use regularly :P
Most of them are for Windows, though some are cross-platform and can also be used on Linux. For my Android system setup, check here.
Programming Tools
Jetbrains IDE
The JetBrains IDE suite is great to work with — it basically shares the IDE market with VSCode.
Navicat
A powerful (and pricey) database management tool that supports many common databases. It’s much more convenient than the built-in database tools in JetBrains IDEs.
Navicat
VMWare Workstation
A virtual machine software that allows you to run VMs on your laptop for testing. Offers more features compared to VirtualBox.
Xshell & Xftp
SSH clients that are free for home/school use. Great for managing multiple SSH server connections.
Xshell
Fiddler
A solid HTTP debugging tool — widely used and doesn’t need much introduction.
Notepad++
A handy text editor with many useful features like regex find-and-replace, folder-wide file search, and encoding conversion.
Notepad++
IDA Pro
An incredibly powerful (and crazy expensive) reverse engineering tool. When doing web scraping or reverse engineering, just throw the binary in — and nothing survives. 😈
Utility Tools
Internet Download Manager
Significantly boosts download speeds, especially under poor network conditions. (NeatDM is a decent free alternative.)
Proxifier
A network proxy tool that offers better performance and less system intrusion than TUN mode. Works well with redir-host — great user experience.
7zip
A common and lightweight archiving tool — no need to elaborate. (Though Windows 11 is adding native extraction support, so we might not need it in the future.)
010 Editor
A feature-rich binary editor. I especially like its Template system for parsing binary data.
010 Editor
Beyond Compare
A fantastic tool for comparing files and folders. Supports various file types including TXT, binary, Excel, and even Windows Registry entries.
Beyond Compare
DiskGenius
A disk management utility that’s great for handling both virtual and local disks, and checking SMART info. Probably one of the few tools without a real alternative.
Everything
An amazingly fast file search tool — once you’ve used it, you’ll never go back. (Its indexing is insanely powerful — Microsoft, take notes. You clearly don’t understand NTFS as well as this.) (Seriously, when will Microsoft fix their built-in search?)
Traffic Monitor
A customizable taskbar widget that displays system stats like network traffic. Comes with plugin support — pretty neat.
Traffic Monitor
Syncthing
For syncing and backing up files across devices. My full backup strategy is documented here.
VLC
An open-source media player that supports a wide range of formats. PotPlayer is also good, but it’s not open-source and has ads.
Tailscale
A WireGuard-based mesh networking tool for connecting devices across locations. It handles NAT traversal and forwarding automatically — could easily be a blog post on its own. 😄 The official Tailscale blog is actually well-written — definitely worth a read.
The client is open-source, and there are open-source server implementations too. Even when using the official server, you can establish cryptographic trust (via Tailnet Lock) without having to trust the server itself.
Snipaste
A screenshot tool with rich annotation features — similar to QQ’s built-in snipping tool, but more powerful.
Powertoys
A collection of system utilities from Microsoft. I’ve written an article about it before.
This article is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Author: lyc8503, Article link: https://blog.lyc8503.net/en/post/software-list-share/
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Feel free to comment in English below o/