Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you’ll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I’ve ever written and no matter how many tabs - it’s all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you’ll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it’s uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it’ll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn’t shit like this more implemented in software?
Since you’re saying “pieces of software” and not specifically apps I will mention Node.js, the programming framework for javascript apps that run outside of a browser. You can develop websites and services or standalone apps that just run locally. There’s a whole universe of free packages people have created for it.
Since you’re saying “pieces of software” and not specifically apps I will mention liburing.
I love Node for small apps and scripts. It’s become my go-to for quick tasks. I’ve even used it to write some small CLI utilities as standalone executables.
Please be careful with dependencies and malware