I’m sharing my list of favorite tools for efficient developer work. This page is under constant change and reformatting.

Utilities

Text Editors

Notepad++ – I’m using for quick read/edit tasks, as it starts very fast.

Visual Studio Code – for more serious development of code, scripts. Recommended extensions: GitLens, Git History, PowerShell

CSV Editor – CSVed

XML Editor – XMLSpy (paid)

Windows Utilities

Rapid Environment Editor portable – Windows environment variable editor.

Revo Uninstaller Portable – Software uninstaller with cleanup capabilities.

7-Zip – archiver for Windows.

FAR Manager – file manager with legacy DOS taste.

Free Commander – free windows file manager. Allowed to use in commercial environment.

Total Commander – windows file manager, FTP client and etc. Trial version, not allowed to use in commercial environment.

Host File Editor – GUI for editing Windows hosts file.

Free Download Manager – download manager for Windows.

Ditto Clipboard Manager – clipboard history.

KeePass – password manager for Windows. Allowed to use in commercial environment.

WinMerge – Compare text files

IrfanView – Image viewer and editor. Not allowed to use in commercial environment. Free alternative to use at work is JPEGView.

Agent Ransack/File Locator Lite – my favorite tool to search for files and file contents, especially for network drivers on Windows machines in corporate environments. Lite version allowed for commercial use. Alternative to use Total Commander (https://www.ghisler.com/) search capability.

GreenShot for printscreen capture and editing. Free to use in commercial environment.

SQL IDE Tools for Snowflake (and other DBs)

DBeaver SQL Editor – community edition free to use in commercial environment. There is also paid version.

DataGrip – paid only version, very similar to dbeaver.

Fonts

I used this blog to download fonts.

Scripting

CygWin

It enables Linux command line (shell or bash) on Windows. Very convenient if whole ETL platform, such as Informatica, Oracle DB is deployed on Linux, but developer machines are running Windows.

Packages I have installed:

lynx – a text-based web browser.
wget – downloads files form web which supports http, https and ftp protocols.
curl – a tool to transfer data from or to a server. It is designed to work without user interaction.
rsync – handy tool for synchronizing stuff from one place to another (especially over the internet)
python3 – an interpreted programming language. I like to write shell scripts with it.
python3-setuptools – people use this when distributing their python stuff.
bzip2, tar, gzip
bash-completion – auto-complete for bash
vim, vim-common
tmux – a terminal multiplexer, allowing a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a single terminal window or remote terminal session.
git – a distributed version control tool.
diffutils – is a package of several programs related to finding differences between files.
openssh – SSH client.
ca-certificates – allows your Cygwin environment to validate SSL certificates. Needed for git as well.
dos2unix – allows convert text files from windows EOL to linux and many other things.
chere – open Cygwin command prompt at any specific folder. Details Open Cygwin at a specific folder
libxml2 – XML library to work with XML files. I use it to query XML file with XPATH and format XML to canonical form in order to compare two simple XML files.

Command line call to install predefined packages from the list above:

setup-x86.exe --no-desktop --download --local-package-dir="C:\cygwin" --packages="lynx,wget,curl,rsync,python3,python3-setuptools,bzip2,tar,gzip,bash-completion,vim,vim-common,tmux,git,diffutils,openssh,ca-certificates,dos2unix,chere,libxml2"