Essential PC Software

Randy Peterman | August 25th, 2006 @ 12:09 pm

TopStyle I live in TopStyle all day long

seanrox | August 25th, 2006 @ 1:42 pm

Good to see you use putty. Not to many people use it but I personally feel it’s a nice SSH client.

So what exactly did Vista do to your machine? I’ll be sticking with XP Pro for a while and since my laptop is dual boot (Fedora and Windows) I’m pretty set with decent operating systems.

Lloyd D Budd | August 25th, 2006 @ 1:47 pm

I prefer WinSCP over Filezilla, both are great. And Beyond Compare is wonderful if I find myself developing under Windows.

seanrox | August 25th, 2006 @ 2:16 pm

“It felt like using Linux in 2004″ - Interesting. I never experienced Linux running slow and I’ve been using some form of Linux since 2000. I use to use Slackware but a couple years ago moved over to Fedora. I guess because I do a lot of custom kernal work, I didn’t notice things running slow.

Glad you got your machine back and things are running smooth. If you max out your RAM on your machine, you won’t need to upgrade to Vista for a long time and can get a lot more life from XP. From what I’ve read, Vista’s a huge resource hog.

Andreas | August 25th, 2006 @ 2:41 pm

If you like Topstyle, you should definitely try Style Master (by western civilisation, http://www.westciv.com/style_master/). It is available for both MacOS and WinXP, and it is generally more comfortable to work with than Topstyle. I admit that I’m biased since Style Master is shipped with most of my open source website templates, but it is simply a great tool!

And, to keep up with code: Notepad++ rocks my world too… =)

Mark | August 25th, 2006 @ 2:59 pm

I have most of the same choices. I recently purchased a laptop for school and travel and had to install all new software on it from scratch. I did not know about Foxmarks (which is a nice addition) and I store all my email and check all my email on Gmail, so I did not install Thunderbird. I also refuse to use iTunes (because of the Quicktime addon).

One peice of software I like to have on all my computers is UltraEdit. That is one windows text editor I could not live without. I love the column mode text edit capabilities including the column fill and regex find and replace. I also like to have Homesite as an HTML/CFML editor. The tag autocomplete has just become a really bad habit.

Marc | August 25th, 2006 @ 3:12 pm

Here are my favorites from when I was using Windows on daily basis. These days I’m mostly on the Mac.

Britta | August 25th, 2006 @ 4:50 pm

Putty: couldn’t live without it! Use it every day.
Love the Tortoise! Always have the latest Wordpress Trunk code.
I agree with Lloyd about WinSCP over FileZilla - neither is perfect, but I prefer WinSCP.

As to local development server: the Uniform Server is the winner for me.

marcoss | August 25th, 2006 @ 8:13 pm

Dreamweaver as your default text editor?

Chris Pirillo | August 25th, 2006 @ 9:06 pm

Dude, dude, dude… no Filezilla. You want WinSCP. Trust me! Built-in support for PuTTY and everything! Please, trust me?!

1. http://winscp.net/

2. http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/18/winscp-pwns/

Oskar Syahbana | August 25th, 2006 @ 10:02 pm

No games?? You know… all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy

Brent O'Connor | August 25th, 2006 @ 10:12 pm

You probably shouldn’t have said, “…for offline plane hacking.” Now you will be investigated by the FBI. Watch out for the black helicopters circling above your apartment.

BTW, I really like WinSCP a lot better than FileZilla. You should give it a try.

Also, how do you survive with out Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks???

Noah Slater | August 26th, 2006 @ 12:18 am

Have you tried Ubuntu GNU/Linux?

Mani | August 26th, 2006 @ 1:02 am

Answering instead of Matt !

Dreamweaver as your default text editor?

Well, Dreamweaver is more than one program… You know what is the most important function of DW? Can’t guess! It cleans up Microsoft Word HTML codes and turn them into XHTML!!

Ken | August 27th, 2006 @ 2:53 am

You do not use Office or Open Office?

A question for those recommending WinSCP, can WinSCP support FTP? As much as I want to avoid, there are still time when I need FTP and Filezilla is good for that.

Jason | August 27th, 2006 @ 12:24 pm

Ewwww, mIRC?
Silverex is my best buddy for Windows IRC, because I’m a total XChat geek anywhere else. I have yet to try XChat Aqua, however…

Britta | August 27th, 2006 @ 5:26 pm

Ken, WinSCP does not do http://FTP.
I agree, there are a few (very few) occasions when I still need/use FTP … for which I keep SmartFTP to hand.

Bob Morris | August 27th, 2006 @ 9:59 pm

I’ll toss in a minority vote for FileZilla. Tried WinSCP, didn’t work for me. FileZilla was home. Foxmarks is amazing, thanks for the tip.

Vista looks like a train wreck about to happen. Will be getting an Ubuntu laptop soon. Full circle here, I guess. I started on the net with a Netcom shell account.

With four XP computers here in our home office, just keeping them updated, stable, and virus-free takes way too much time. Gosh, Microsoft, let me stop everything I’m doing because your Patch Tuesday has eight updates to fix problems that never should have happened in the first place.

Brent O'Connor | August 28th, 2006 @ 7:09 am

Ken, No WinSCP doesn’t support http://FTP. I haven’t used FTP since the 90’s so I don’t miss it not having FTP support!

BillH | August 28th, 2006 @ 7:47 am

I use PS Pad to do all development. It is great for editing HTML, CSS and PHP (right on the website if you want) and no need for Beyond Compare - it’s built in to PS Pad. Think of it as a free UltraEdit. Heck, it’s my Notepad replacement as well. ( http://www.pspad.com/ )

MASA | August 28th, 2006 @ 2:27 pm

FireFTP all the time. One less program to install, works in firefox

Jonathan | August 28th, 2006 @ 2:51 pm

I quit using Dreamweaver entirely. It just wasn’t for me. I use Notepad2 and upload via http://FTP. I’ve got both FileZilla and WinSCP. I usually end up using the former, but don’t have any preference either way. I also have PuTTY, but I never use it.

Bob Morris | August 29th, 2006 @ 12:16 am

FireFTP is great, but I can’t get it to copy entire directories and all the files and subdirectories under it, something that is needed when updating a WordPress version manually. FileZilla does do that, though.

Kelley | August 29th, 2006 @ 3:45 pm

Ok, so I give up… if you don’t use FTP to get your files uploaded to your site… what protocol does one use??? I’m so confused. I thought that FTP was the only way to get files from point a to point b over the net.

Lloyd D Budd | August 29th, 2006 @ 6:38 pm

Kelley: sftp (ssh) not insecure http://ftp.

Pedro Luz | August 31st, 2006 @ 11:31 am

Nobody talking about free portable applications ? I use Portable Notepad++, Portable FileZilla, Portable WinAmp, Portable XnView, Portable File Commander, Portable JAlbum, Portable Komposer and Portable eMule. Most of this applicatios can be found on http://www.portablefreeware.com - I love this site and my WinXP Pro is allways clean of dirty installations… And in most of cases, legalized ! Regards from Brazil !

Wayne Hall | September 7th, 2006 @ 10:29 pm

Mustn’t forget GVIM, cygwin, Trillian Pro, Visio, BlackICE, Google Desktop, Picasa2 and my absolute fave… SnagIT!

Luke | September 10th, 2006 @ 11:18 am

Matt, since you’ve tried (and will try again) Linux before, I don’t want to belabor the point… Don’t you find it funny that Telnet, SSH, FTP, Firefox, Thunderbird, SVN, etc are already included in most GNU/Linux distros?

Vinny Carpenter | September 23rd, 2006 @ 5:51 pm

Hi Matt. I just made the same list as I just got a new computer finally up and running with all the things that I really need. Check it out here

–Vinny
http://www.j2eegeek.com/blog/ | http://vinny.wordpress.com/

Mark | June 17th, 2007 @ 12:38 pm

I recently upgraded to Vista and am finding it challenging yet rewarding overcoming the “hiccups” it presents. I also feel that it’s teaching me ‘why’ Vista works the way it does which gives me a better understanding of it. This is helpful as so many people ask for help with pc’s and nearly all of the new machines I’ve come across are running some incarnatin of Vista. I take my hat off to anyone who has tried it and didn’t like it but I also feel that it will get us all in the end with Direcx 10 threatening to work ONLY on Vista and so on. It’s the future…. like it or not !