6 Apps That Make You Go, “What is that?!”
Work smarter, not harder with these free developer productivity tools for Windows.
I’ve logged tens of thousands of hours behind a computer. Occasionally, I stumble upon an app that changes the way I work and begs the question “Why didn’t I know about this sooner!?”
You know, that split second moment pairing with a coworker when an unfamiliar app flashes and your brain says “Wait, what was that!?”
These 5 programs are crown jewels from a vast sea of developer productivity tools. Use them to be more efficient, generate higher quality results, improve communication and just simply have an easier day.
These apps are so good I guarantee you tell someone else about them.
Beyond Compare
Beyond Compare is the pinnacle tool for comparing digital things like files, folders, binaries, Git commits, Excel spreadsheets and much more. BC is a robust tool that gets me to better results in less time.
It really shines when resolving merge conflicts in Git. I’ve tried other tools to handle merge conflicts and I’m always left feeling confused and unsure if what I agreed to is actually correct.
While technically it’s a paid tool (and you should snag a copy if it’s useful), Beyond Compare has a generous trial period that makes it a worthwhile tool to trial.
Download at https://www.scootersoftware.com
Ditto
Ditto monitors the Windows clipboard building a history of copied text and images. Ditto is only a keyboard shortcut away from showing the history and also makes history searchable.
I know you’ve cut something from your IDE to save for a moment only to inadvertently cut another block of text and lose the original clipboard. Never do that again because Ditto has your back.
Download at https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io
Greenshot
Greenshot is for pixel perfect screenshots with the easy-to-use built-in tools to annotate screenshots with arrows, text and highlights. Capture the entire window or use the region selector option to snip the perfect block.
Download at https://getgreenshot.org
Everything
Everything provides instant search of every file and folder name on your computer. It’s what Windows search should have been. Everything unlocks an incredible power to find virtually any file on your computer, instantly.
Download at https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
Sublime Text
Sublime Text was once the hip and cool text editor many years before VS Code. While it’s lost some fanfare, it’s just as useful as ever. Sublime Text is a blazing fast text editor. Amongst my favorite features is the automagic save-the-content-on-every-tab and persists the data between app restarts.
Truth be told, I use multiple text editors depending on the task. Sublime Text is the perfect complement to VS Code.
Download at https://www.sublimetext.com/download
WinDirStat
Track every byte of disk usage in just a few seconds. I reach for WinDirStat when needing to analyze disk space to find the files and folders that are hogging all of the space. As developers, we put A LOT of stuff on the laptop and sometimes we just need to find the files weighing us down.
Download at https://windirstat.net/download.html