Surviving on Windows

From Freehackers

Here are some useful tools for linux freaks that, for whatever reason, need to work under windows.

See also the yzis page

Contents 1 Development 2 Internet 3 Tools/Utilities 4 Graphics 5 Office 6 Video & Audio

[edit] Development

• Vim
• Cygwin: No sane human can survive without full unix shell: bash, find, grep, cp, diff and co are all there.

• TortoiseCVS
• TortoiseSVN
• Winmerge
• Doxygen
• ActivePython: Comes with windows doc, very handy
• EasyPhp
• InnoSetup: generates nice and powerful windows installer. See the dedicated page for Windows installer (also covers NSIS)
• Dependancy Walker: view the dll dependancy graph of any executable or DLL, equivalent of unix ldd
• Sys Internals tools. Every tool is useful. Most useful:
  • DebugView: view debug output from a non console application
  • PortMon: Spy the serial port
  • File mon: spy on files being opened or closed
  • Reg mon : spy all the accesses to the windows registry

[edit] Internet

• Firefox: no introduction needed for this killer app from the mozilla team.
• Thunderbird mail reader, also from the mozilla team.
• Enigmail: pgp plugin for thunderbird, very useful
• Putty: ssh client and ssh key handler (pageant)
• Winscp: super useful to drag'n drop files onto a ssh remote location
• RealVnc
• Ethereal
• XChat : the best irc client for windows imho (thomas)
• Jabber, Psi (beurk)

Free as in beer but not free software:

• Spybot Search'n Destroy: get rid of your adware and of all program that are supriously started by windows upon each startup
• ZoneLabs: you can not survive on windows without a minimal firewall

[edit] Tools/Utilities

• Console: an equivalent of Konsole, but for windows: multi-tab and very quick display (in comparison to the windows console) are the main killer features.
• Truecrypt: encrypt partitions or files. Useful for usb keys or laptop. encrypted stuff can be read from windows and linux.
• 7Zip: unzip but old-school interface
• gpg4win: different GPG frontends for Windows. WinPT is the best one IMHO
• Workrave: anti-RSI
• Clamwin: antivirus

Free as in beer but not free software:

• ISO Recorder: create cd from ISO on windows.
• Winrar: can handle tar.gz and tar.bz2 as well as all the classical windows compression formats (rar, arj, zip, ...)
• Advanced Calculator: a good calculator: RPN, graphs, ...
• Windows Power Toys: more goodies
  • Open DOS window here in exporer
  • Virtual Desktop Manager
  • Replace Stupid calculator by Scientific Calculator
• Free Launch Bar: stack icons in the windows launch bar, super practical
• xplorer2: a replacement of windows explorer. More features, quicker.

[edit] Graphics

• Gimp
• Skencil (formerly Sketch) vector drawing
• inkscape vector drawing
• scribus Desktop publishing

Free as in beer but not free software:

• IrfanView: nice and practical

[edit] Office

• Openoffice (french)
• PDFCreator: Create a PDF from any file in windows with this virtual printer
• StarUML
• Foxit: a PDF viewer 3 times lighter that Adobe Acrobat

[edit] Video & Audio

• Videolan Client (VLC)
• mplayer

Free as in beer but not free software:

• iTunes