General§

switching.software | Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software

For powernormies§

Vivaldi: A web browser based on Chromium. Extremely customizable with lots of quality-of-life features and full support for Chrome extensions. Akin to what Opera used to be.

Greenshot: Excellent screenshot software. Low overhead with hotkeys for capturing a window, screen, or arbitrary region. FOSS.

GRC | InControl: Disable Windows automatic updates. You know, the ones that reboot your computer and then pretend they didn’t.

ScreenToGif: Speaking of screenshots, ScreenToGif is an casual screen recorder for capturing quick clips or interactions. Has a very nice built-in gif editor too. Not a replacement for OBS, but much better for quick jobs. FOSS.

7zip: Packs, unpacks, compresses, and decompresses archives. Handles zip, rar, 7z, gzip, and tar archives, as well as things you might not think of like ISOs and some EXEs. What are you gonna use, winrar? Windows explorer? Please. FOSS.

OpenShell: Replaces the windows 10 trash fire with a real, usable start menu. An absolute necessity. Formerly Start10, but they moved to single-device licenses, so screw that.

VLC Media Player: A basic video player with codecs that support most formats. Also has built-in tools for managing playlists, converting media, using CDs/DVDs, and even network video streams. FOSS. Daum PotPlayer is another good option.

PowerToys: Remember PowerToys from Windows XP? Microsoft brought the name back for a set of Windows 10 utilities. Includes a colour picker, SVG previewer, and power tools for renaming and managing files in explorer. FOSS.

Fluent Reader: My RSS feed reader. This recommendation is qualified, though, there are a few issues; it’s electron, so it’s a bit slow, and there are some UI quirks. But it’ll let you read feeds alright, and I haven’t had any major complaints yet.

Wiztree: A windows-optimized disk usage visualizer (in the vein of k4dirstat) with special optimizations for NTFS drives with a readable MFT. Freeware with a donate nag button (I paid for mine and if you like it you should too!)

Wincompose: A compose key for windows. Allows you to type special characters directly from the keyboard, but using a true compose key instead of memorized codepoints. Fast and lightweight, with support for standard compose file formats and custom expansions. FOSS

KeePassXC: A modern, self-managed KeePass-based password manager. It has all the integrations you need: browser extensions, mobile support, and even auto-type. Also has features like password generation and health checks to find weak or reused passwords. Please don’t just keep your passwords in your browser profile.

Babelmap: A charmap alternative that allows you to browse through the entire Unicode codeset. Supports manual font settings (including composite fonts w/ fallbacks) and searching for characters by Unicode name or block. See also Babelpad, which is a lightweight notepad app with Babelmap functionality built-in. Freeware

paint.net: A lightweight, high-quality image editor for Windows. Not a feature-complete suite like Photoshop, GIMP, or Clip Studio, but a very good replacement for paint if you working on something that doesn’t require highly advanced brush features. Has a robust plugin system for extra effects and filters. Freeware

Everything: A powerful lightweight file search tool.

XnView MP: A nice explorer alternative for viewing and managing media. Shows extended metadata and has live previews for gifs, webms, and video. Also has built-in tools for image resizing and conversion. Freeware

Netlimiter: Advanced client-side network controls. Has blacklist/whitelist controls, and allows you to prioritize some traffic and deprioritize others, which is excellent for reducing latency on online games and streaming services. $15/yr

Playnite: An open source video game library manager and organizer with first-class extension support. Integrates with Itch.io, Steam, Epic, etc, as well as manually installed games and game/runtime pair models like emulators and Flash. Optionally organizes games by metadata and completion status, pulls data from How Long To Beat, alerts you of sales based on parameters you set, and more.
On Linux (including Steam OS), try Lutris

wolfram|alpha (website): An advanced contextual calculator that can solve complex equations and, more importantly, handle unit conversions.

obsidian: A markdown based writing and journaling program.

Browser Extensions§

Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans: Uses various methods to automatically solve some web captchas.

ClearURLs: Removing tracking elements from URLs.

Consent-O-Matic: Automated opt-out of GDPR consent forms.

Don't F*** With Paste: Prevents websites from disabling the browser’s paste function.

fastforward: Skips through link redirection sites

RevEye Reverse Image Search: Multi-engine reverse image search

Right-Click Borescope: Lists all images under your cursor on a page, even “background” images, so you can inspect or copy them.

Session Buddy: A tab/session manager

Simple mass downloader: A batch download assistant. Executes commands like “download all the image files on this page, but only two at a time to prevent DOS/throttling”.

Violentmonkey: Userscript engine

Stylus: User styles

Devtools§

Cygwin: A distribution of unix utilities for windows, along with a robust POSIX api. Nab yourself mintty and chere while you’re at it, and just roll around in that bash goodness. You’ll also want gnuwin32. NB: I have not tried WSL yet, though I have heard good things.

Link Shell Extension: Manage windows links from the shell context menu. This changed my life. Make junctions to put folders where you want them. Stash your documents folder on another hard drive entirely. The world is yours.

Sublime Text: An emacs-like comparable to Atom, with a robust package library based on Python. My usual go-to text editor for programming projects. I have at least 4 Sublime Text windows open at any given time. See also Sublime Merge, $80 or an unlimited free trial with occasional nags. See also Sublime Merge, a git client (comparable to gitkracken) from the same company.

Emacs: Yes, really. For a rich IDE-like editor in a terminal environment, emacs is the way to go. I always use it with Evil Mode and vim’s modal editing features. I have my setup available in my dotfiles repo that you can use as reference.

just: Make, but for tasks instead of builds.