sudo-EatPant

Kran'ts Ton

@sudo-EatPant

I'm using tilt controls!

am 27 | furry & retro tech | very bi | operator of @UCVRCG

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sudo-EatPant
@sudo-EatPant
greytdepression
@greytdepression
slimelia
@slimelia

i love software i love tools i love utilities. show me your favourite free and/or open-source software that people might not have heard of that you love

slimelia
@slimelia

ok fine i'll start

NameDescription
Chris Titus Tech's Windows UtilityTweak Windows settings, install/update a wide range of useful software from a single screen (including some software featured on this list), run O&O Shutup directly, and has a feature to create super-small Win11 ISOs (which didn't work last time I tried it lol). Runs directly from a single command in PowerShell.
CondutionTask management software with all the standard features you expect from a modern To-Do list application.
DeblurVery fun tool to deblur a blurred image. Not particularly useful as it cannot do so accurately, but fun!
EverythingVery fast filesearch for Windows.
JERNCommand-line journaling tool, intended to be used on a USB drive. Encrypted using AES-128 encryption.
JetUMLFast, simple, free UML diagram designer.
jPDFtweak"Swiss Army Knife" for PDF files. Has a lot of incredibly useful PDF utilities.
JRNLA cute daily journaling tool with fun themes and options for daily notifications.
KDE ConnectConnect your PC to your phone - share files, links, clipboard data, notifications, remote control input, run commands, and more.
magic-wormholeCommand-line tool to send files from one machine to another by providing human-pronouncable keywords.
NiniteInstall and update all your programs at once. Chris Titus' Winutils has a similar feature & includes more software, but this is far more beginner-friendly. No command lines here! Also not that useful if you know how to install software using Winget/Scoop/Chocolatey, but again - beginner-friendly and idiot-proof!
O&O Shutup10++Windows tweaks - primarily disabling telemetry and unwanted bloat from Microsoft. Lets you switch off all the AI bullshit in Win11! This tool can also be opened from within Chris Titus' Winutils.
PlayniteGames library for your games libraries - consolidate GOG, Steam, Itch, and just about everything into one application where you can search & filter your library.
QOwnNotesMarkdown note-taking software. Simple and lightweight without the overload of bloat and features competitors like Obsidian or Notion have.
QTodoTxt To-do manager - a GUI frontend for the todo.txt plaintext format.
RetroSharePeer-to-peer chat, file sharing, mail, forums, channels, boards, and more - almost like a self-contained peer-to-peer social network.
StacherGUI frontend for yt-dlp - a downloader for YouTube videos and also many many other websites. (I use it to get Twitter videos!)
tldr pagesCommand-line tool for simple manual pages - has basic usage and examples for many popular CLI applications.
Winaero TweakerAllows you to make various miscellaneous changed to Windows
Zim - A Desktop WikiPersonal Wiki software with ability to publish files to HTML. Can be minimalist or feature-rich depending on how many plugins you enable.

i have more installed on my home desktop PC that i'm surely forgetting but it was 33°C yesterday so i was NOTTTT turning that computer on

edit: 2024-08-13 @539 - added Winaero Tweaker, O&O Shutup, CTT Winutils, Ninite and Stacher

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in reply to @slimelia's post:

in reply to @slimelia's post:

knutaf
@knutaf

i too love tools! a lot that i hadn't heard of in here and some look useful for me, thanks.

total plug, but i wrote netcrab, a pretty good swiss army knife of tcp/udp connectivity a while back.

you didn't mention the sysinternals tools, but a lot of them are extremely useful, process explorer, process monitor, procdump, and psexec especially.

ripgrep is the best regex search program i've used.

icacls.exe is a great built-in windows util for inspecting and changing permissions of files

when my keyboard forgets its repeat delay i've been using keyrate to fix it quickly from the command line

another plug, i wrote a small utility to renumber files with a pattern you select.

and another utility called outtime to prefix stdout output with the timestamp when it was emitted. generally used to pipe output into.

spy++ is very good for inspecting win32 window messages and windowing stuff, at least in some programs

about all i can think of at the moment

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its-january
@its-january

Windows PowerToys is a free bundle of little QOL utilities from Microsoft. Out of the 25-ish available utilities, there's some real stand-outs that I use every day.

  • FancyZones lets you snap windows to pre-defined or custom layouts, sorta like a better version of Aero Snap mixed with a tiling window manager.
  • PowerRename gives you a right-click option in Explorer to bulk-rename files and directories using regular expressions. (I've been doing a lot of renaming video files lately, and this is so much easier to use than manually writing a Python script every single time.)
  • File Locksmith tells you what programs are using a file, and gives you the option to kill them.
  • Crop And Lock lets you take an arbitrary section of a window and output it to a little preview window. (If I need to keep an eye on something like food delivery status and I don't want to have an entire browser window open, it comes in handy.)

Another useful program is ShareX. It's a Swiss army knife for screen capture - you can take Snipping Tool-like regional screenshots, record GIFs, take scrolling screenshots, automatically upload captures to file sharing sites, and a boat-load of other stuff too.

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