List of handy tools for Windows

Being a developer is hard work. Here is a list of tools that will help you out in a tricky situation.

This list focuses on small tools. It assumes you already know about things like Blender, Photoshop, Unity, GIT, etc. .

If you are an experienced developer then you probably know most of these already.

Video Editing and Recording

OBS Studio

The one streaming solution that everyone uses. It's also good at recording gameplay.

GifCam

There is no shortage of gif recording apps out there. A very handy one is GifCam. The neat trick they use is a see-through window and a very streamlined recording experience. This makes it super easy and quick to record gifs. Their compression options are good too.

Lossless-cut

Yeah sure, it's just another FFmpeg GUI. But it's a very convenient one at that. The nice ability of this tool is to cut the video without re-encoding it. This means it's super fast (the cuts are done almost instantly).

I use it a lot to simply cut away the OBS dialog at the beginning and end of a recording.

VLC Media Player

They say it's the ultimate video player and they mean it. It plays everything, streams everything, and records everything. Its more advanced features are sometimes a bit complicated to use. However, it is the go-to video player, period.

GreenShot

All the images in here have been made with Greenshot. It's incredibly easy to make pixel-perfect screenshots with it. Once installed it conveniently hides away in the system tray.

Text Editors

Notepad++

Okay, this one is well-known. But it is notoriously hard to google. Notepad++ is your jack of all trades. It has a plugin for every use-case you can think of. It's lightning-fast and free.

glogg

If you have a really big log file (like GB+ size), one that makes even Notepad++ choke, then glogg has your back. It streams the file and thus you can open pretty much anything. The caveat: you can not edit the files. It's just for viewing.

The best part is it's open-source.

JSONedit

Use this if you need to inspect and edit big JSON files. It features a nice tree view which makes editing JSON a breeze.

Productivity

QT TabBar

Over a decade old but still working. This adds tabs and a handy filter field to your explorer.

Rapid Environment Editor

Editing the environment variables has always been a pain in Windows. It got better in recent version but Rapid EE is still a great option.

FileZilla

It's the most well-known FOSS file transfer client.

System Analysis & Debugging

Sysinternals

Sysinterlas is a set of tools originally created by Mark Russinovich and later acquired by Microsoft. They are very handy when it comes to analyzing what's happening under the hood.

If you want to see all the places a tool is registered for auto-start, use the Autoruns tool.

If you want to know what files or RegEdit keys a program is writing to then use ProcMon.

Want to see networking requests use Portmon. Want to see how the TaskManager would look on steroids, try ProcessExplorer.

There are just too many handy tools to list them all. Check out the Sysinternals website and take your pick.

There even are new additions made over time, like ZoomIt, a no-fuss screen recording tool. One click and you are cording a .mp4 of your screen, easy.

Lock Hunter

Whenever a program decides that it owns a file (like it really does not want you to do anything with it) then it can be very cumbersome to move or rename that file. Sometimes that program is called "explorer" or maybe "photoshop", or, or, or. You may not know which program is locking a file at the moment and it drives you crazy.

In these situations, Lock Hunter is there to help. Simply right-click > What's locking this file > Unlock It > done. Yes, the locking program may complain but at least now you can move the file without being bothered.

Driver View

It is a handy tool if you want to know which (graphics) driver is currently loaded and where it is located. There are a lot of other handy tools on the https://www.nirsoft.net website.

Health

f.lux

It now is general knowledge that too much blue light in the evening is bad for your sleep cycle. Windows 10 and 11 have a setting for that called "Night light". If you want more control over how your colors are changed then f.lux is the right tool for you.

Unity

Unity Launcher Pro

I use this every day to open my Unity projects. Why? Because it is much faster than the Unity Hub and the view is more condensed. It's all about productivity. I have 40+ projects and the Unity Hub can only handle 40. The Unity Launcher Pro can do more.

Security

Keepass

Good (long, unique) passwords are important. To keep your sanity with all these passwords a trustworthy key manager is probably a good idea.

Asset Recommendations

I hope you liked the article. Here are some assets we'd like to recommend. They are all about productivity. If you buy one of them then we will receive some money which helps fund this project.

Sources

1. According to the Google Developer Account  BahraniApps is located in Bahrain (BLDG. 228 ROAD 38, Block 540, Bahrain) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.bahraniapps.drawandtalk&hl=en&gl=US
2. According to the USPO f.lux trademark is registered to F.lux Software LLC LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY CALIFORNIA 929 Gretna Green Way Los Angeles CALIFORNIA 90049
   https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:3nwm4u.3.1