My Software Craftsmanship tools

Every developer has his/her own set of nifty tools that they cannot do without. I have my own collection of such utility tools that I find indispensable. Here I’ll be maintaining a list of all such tools that I love using during my day to day work as a software developer. I would love to hear your opinions on these and any tools that you might want to recommend over the ones that I list here.

Text editors

• Notepad++ I’ve been using this editor from ages now and have found it to be one of the most flexible and feature rich editors. It comes with support for various plugins which I like the most about it. It is a free tool that runs only on the Windows platform.
• Visual Studio Code This is the new kid on the block from the Microsoft stable. It’s free and the best part is it supports all the 3 platforms Windows, Linux and Mac. It also has inbuilt support for Markdown.
• Sublime I use this mainly to load large files. While notepad++ hangs/freezes when it comes to loading large files, Sublime, lives upto its name and is able to effortlessly load the files with not as much of a sweat.

IDEs

• Visual Studio Well, I find this to be one of the best IDEs out there if you are a .Net developer. I have used a few other IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ etc. While each of them offer their own unique and useful features, I find this IDE to be the best in terms of memory usage and performance.

Monitor Log Files

• Bare Tail This is a free real-time log file monitoring tool. It can easily load large files and also provides some pretty nifty features like tailing a log file in real time, highlighting different log entries based on patterns and regular expressions. A very useful tool indeed!!

Windows command line alternatives

• Cmder If you’ve been looking for alternatives to the command line terminal in windows due to lack of some nifty features, look no further. Cmder is a console emulator with a nice simplistic look and feel and is also quite wonderful to use.
• Windows Terminal (Preview) While this tool is in preview (at the time of writing - v0.7), it does a pretty good job of bringing multiple CLIs under the same roof. It’s still a work in progress though, but looks promising and I’m sure it will surpass the Cmder tool at some point.

Screenshot tools

• Lightshot This is quite a nifty tool from Skillbrains, which helps take customizable screenshots with ease. You can quickly annotate, add symbols, print or even share online in seconds. Anyone who still uses MSPaint or Snipping tool should consider switching over to this one.

Quick launchers

• SlickRun I love this tool for its simplicity and ability to quick launch programs with custom aliases from anywhere on your desktop with the click of a few buttons. It’s a pretty old tool but the gets the job done without too much tinkering.

Version control systems

• Git Extensions When it comes to using Git version control, I’ve always preferred GUI clients. Git Extensions has been my client of choice for a long time. It provides a very simple interface and does not bog down the user with too many options. I’m also evaluating another version control system Fork at the time of this writing. It looks to be promising and looks like I might soon switch over to it as my mainstream Git GUI client.