I will forever recommend VoidTools’ Everything ever since someone first introduced it to me some few years ago.
It indexes your entire filesystem and allows you to search for files by name (and by content for text files!) and even allowing RegEx searching for file names, and filters for certain file types and the like.
I don’t know who down voted you, because Everything is really really good.
Quick as a nimble, it instantly finds anything on your drives.
My dear colleague bashed my ears for more than a year about this VoidTools soft before I begrudgingly installed it, lo and behold it’s seriously one of the best tools I have ever stumbled upon.
Its very strange, I’m still not convinced we all don’t use downvote both punitively and in the curation-sense. I actually like to upvote things that are radically incorrect only if there’s a compelling rebuttal existant
At one point the software stopped working on my computer at work. I couldn’t believe how many times I used it throughout the day without realizing it. My only issue is that it can’t search network shares properly.
Everything is a godsend, I install it on every Windows machine I use. But it always makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn’t integrate such search features in their own OS.
A lot of the time I need to go digging around in some of my old files from backups to find something (that I remember the file name of, but not the path), so it helps there.
It also helps when I need to find the path of something quickly, as I can just find it by name and use the “Copy as Path” context menu option directly from the results window.
… definitely helps as well when I can’t seem to keep my files organised for too long and they get super cluttered quickly, skill issue on my part there.
Not sure if a hidden gem or not, but WingetUI is pretty handy. You can manage software in winget, scoop, chocolatey, pip, npm and .net with a graphics interface.
I believe WingetUI already runs in silent mode, it suppresses most windows in my experience. You can define parameters for individual packages, but not globally as far as I know, you’d have to check the documentation or their github to be sure.
Not sure if it can really be considered hidden, but many people don’t seem to know about TreeSize. It’s an incredibly useful tool to find out what takes up space on your drives.
There’s an easy solution to that. If you donate, it’ll remove the button.
It’s a good deal. The money saved from not having to buy new drives / not having to manually calculate usage yourself would be far greater than any donation.
Unfortunately, WinDirStat is essentially abandoned… The latest version 1.1.2 was released in 2005. Wiztree is my favourite alternative, but it’s not open-source.
Definitely PowerToys, there’s some great utilities in there like a Spotlight-esque search/launch bar or a tool to rename multiple files at once.
EarTrumpet is great, too, being basically an enhanced version of the standard audio mixer that lets you change audio devices quickly.
My favourite Windows-only app is probably Foobar2000, though, it’s an endlessly customisable music player with hundreds of plug-ins for nearly every conceivable use case. It takes a while to set up but once you do there’s nothing better.
I ment one photo viewer. I only like it because it’s a very minimalistic photo viewer and also the windows photo kept crashing at some point so I needed a replacement.
I was thinking of adding it to my list but I’m trying not to download any software on a browser if I can try because I might click on one of those fake look-a-like site that give you malware like what happened to gimp with google ads a while back.
Another reason for why I didn’t added it to my list is that it doesn’t have apps that I perfer like ungoogled chromium, brave, Librewolf, MPV, neovim, rustdesk, croc, rust, Gog, vscodium, prism launcher, signal, simplex, tor browser, yt-dlp, and Obsidian.
Package mangers are way better for updating than using ninite so I won’t have to deel with an app just sending me to download the newest verson.
I do like using ninite for when a friend or family asking for some help with a file so I send them a ninite with Libreoffice, VLC, and 7-Zip (but now win 11 has native support for winrar and 7z so it isn’t need for most users)
And yes I know that ninite is very defferent from a package manager, all i’m try to say is that I would rather sepnd a little more time setting up choco then use ninite.
No, because whilst Linux is a good operating system, and, realistically, apple products are good at what they’re designed to do. Some of the fan base just won’t shut up and just have to insert their views wherever they want.
It’s annoying to see that type of shit. And yes, I’m fully aware hard core windows users will do it too, but here, I haven’t seen one comment where they’ve forced themselves into an unrelated question, unless it was as backstop or something.
Not technically a program altho it can be, I recommend Privacy.sexy for mass-configuring the best settings for your respective platform (Windows/Linux/MacOS). And there are LOTS of settings to configure for Windows it seems altho thats the case as well for Mac and I can’t speak to Linux
TreeSize has saved me a lot of bytes over the years. Performant and visually slick. I would prefer a FOSS utility, though. Apparently, reading other comments here, there isn’t an actively maintained one that isn’t garbage. Oh well.
Procmon has gotten me out of a couple binds. Task Manager can only do so much for you. I’ve always been dubious of people who deify Task Manager as some ultimate authority of the OS that kicks ass and takes no prisoners, as I’ve run into several problems it couldn’t solve for me. Procmon feels like the real version of that mythic Task Manager. The main thing it can do which Task Manager (to my knowledge) cannot do that I’ve needed several times is detect which running processes have a lock on a given file, so I can kill them.
KeePassXC is KeePass2, but not sinfully ugly. It’s FOSS and equally functional as the program it aims to supplant, but it’s also multiplatform (so I can use it on Linux without Mono!) and it looks like it actually has a design philosophy developed by someone who knows a thing or two about UX design. Also, it lets you auto bulk download favicons for all of your key entries. With KeePass2 I had to do that manually one by one. I was happy to do it then thinking the program was worth it, but now that I know there’s a better way I feel like an idiot for putting up with it for as long as I did.
Also, just a short rant: I am so glad Windows finally has a native OpenSSH implementation that ships with the OS. Because that means good fucking riddance to PuTTY and WinSPC. I appreciate them having been there to be our secure and stable options for SSH and FTP/SFTP clients on Windows over the years. But now that I can finally do those things in the terminal with standard cross-platform tools, I no longer have to use their ugly, clumsy GUIs, their stupid .ppk key format, or WinSCP’s cryptic command line args ever again, and I couldn’t be happier.
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