Every now and then I get the opportunity to watch someone else do their work on their machine. Apart from the interesting (different?) ways they solve their tasks, it is also interesting to note what tools they use to get their tasks done. Over the years people have posted their favorite tools for usage and I’ve always found it instructional. So without further ado, here is my list of tools that I use. I’ll just keep updating this article as I go I suppose.
Editors
Visual Studio 2017. Less and less nowadays, but alternatives on windows are just worse.
DropToGif. Making easy to embedd animated gifs instead of quicktime movies. Gotta think about those windows people.
MonoDraw. Fantasic diagram editor that exports to markdown, png or svg. Easy ascii art (in unicode!) for your code comments.
File
Total Commander. I was a fan of Norton Commander back when, and now I can’t live without this clone on windows. Addiction started back in the DICE Gothenburg office and every place I’ve been at, we would buy a new copy of this.
WinDBG, when Visual Studio fails (and it does every now and then) you have to turn to a real debugger. It’s also kind of cryptic, but if you stay with it, there are rewards. It can also be scripted from the command line!
ProcMon is strace/truss for windows. You can trace, with callstacks, every system call.
Process Explorer gives you a high level overview of what your windows system is doing.
Process Hacker, for when Process Explorer fails to kill that one process, there are more options (that can cause a blue screen!) to kill pesky processes in this tool.
Dependency Walker when you need to figure out what dlls a particular PE requires.
Performance
UIforETW: Bruce Dawson wrote this awesome frontend so that you don’t have to write a batch file around xperf. If you are new to ETW, then you should definitely take the time to watch Bruce’s instructional videos on the subject matter.
Network
Little snitch, a personal firewall for MacOSX. Great for controlling the traffic and observing what is going on.
Serial, a no driver required little terminal emulator for serial ports (great for connecting to those pesky switches or other devices that only have a serial port!)
Misc
LastPass, because all the poor password practices requires you to change your password all the time and I can’t be bothered to remember them.
iTerm2, because it’s so much better at rendering strange things than the stock terminal.
BeyondCompare is just the best compare tool out there. Handles diffing of large binary files and directories like a breeze.
Gitup, for when the command line just doesn’t cut it in git.