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?
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Also great is paint dot net which is a super advanced paint application that is borderline as good as photo shop, particularly when you add on all the community-created functionality.
Revo uninstaller is the first thing I put on a new machine before I delete all the bloatware that comes with a fresh install of windows. You would be surprised what is left over when you only use the built in ‘remove a program’ process.
Lastly, browser based but free and excellent, is sketch up, which is an architectural rendering application great for designing restaurants and retail spaces. A little bit of a learning curve but very smooth and functional once you get the hang of it.
Edit - VLC goes without saying right?
I’ve been using MPV instead of VLC for a few years now. I find it has more consistent support for a wider variety of files, though controlling it is a little harder and often requires you to look up keybinds (which to be fair I did all the time for VLC too).
Not to pick an argument, but as a dev VSCodium has been a significantly better experience. It’s a good text editor, it’s got good search functionality, can be used as an IDE, and has good support through extensions.
And more of a shallow reason, it’s got much better dark mode support.