[quote post=”2185″]Vim is great and I’m a huge vi fan, but, unless I’m retarded, mouse support isn’t the best. Obviously, vim is keyboard controlled but that just doesn’t feel right in Windows.[/quote]

Actually, vim works fine with the mouse. Especially the windows version, which comes with key bindings for Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V. When you are in the instert mode it really doesn’t act that much different from notepad. But then maybe I’m just so used to Vim quirks that I don’t notice them anymore. :P

I love posts like this. Everyone uses different software and thinks what they use is the best … so I might as well list what I use, also. :)

Text Editting: Notepad++. Vim is great and I’m a huge vi fan, but, unless I’m retarded, mouse support isn’t the best. Obviously, vim is keyboard controlled but that just doesn’t feel right in Windows.

File Compression: 7-zip (FOSS is the best). Before that you couldn’t get me to switch from WinRAR.

IM: A very minimal Miranda with the Smite plugin (I think that’s it, it’s been a while since I’ve used IM). Honestly, I don’t even remember what the plugin does. Maybe it adds tabs, reduces the UI, something. :/

IRC: Again, I used to be heavy into IRC but I just don’t have the time these days. When I do get on (and I’m on Windows) I use Besirc (more FOSS) but I did use XChat when it was free. In Linux I use irssi.

Newsgroup downloading: I switch between GrabIt and AltBinz.

RDP: VisionApp.

Windows clock: I use a double-height taskbar (top row is quicklaunch icons, bottom row is the window lists (I forget the technical name)) so my clock shows up with the time, day, and month/date/year. I used to use TClock2 back in the day and, honestly, forgot all about it.

PHP: I’m not a programmer but some of my friends are and they use PsPad. I have no idea how it compares to Komodo but I thought I’d share that.

AV: ClamAV never gets good reviews in any comparison test I’ve seen. I’ve always been a fan of AVG and AntiVir but I like AVG’s minimalistic interface better, however AntiVir seems to get better scores.

Firewalls: I run Comodo at home but with the Defense module turned on everything seems to run s.l.o.w. I also have the TeaTimer from Search&Destroy on so that might count for some of it.

Music: Winamp was my app of choice until I started using Foobar. I still use Winamp sometimes because you can’t put Foobar in Shade mode. I have iTunes installed but it’s strictly for managing my iPod.

iPod: Speaking of which, I use Sharepod for pulling songs off of my iPod and onto my PC. I hear Foola/Floola/something is better but I haven’t had a chance to use it yet.

Encryption: Truecrypt all the way. Is there even anything else? My USB key is encrypted and I’m halfway tempted to do a full disk encryption on my laptop since the new version supports it!

Email client: Gmail. I was a big fan of Eudora back in the day and even ran TheBat some. I have too many systems these days so the more I can keep on the web, the better. I do dislike Google having access to my email but they 0wn the world anyway so I might as well give in, right?

RSS: Bloglines. I DO NOT like Google’s RSS interface. Bloglines is more like Windows Explorer which I really dig. I don’t do RSS clients though I hear that SharpReader (I think that’s the name) is really nice. BTW I’m currently subscribed to 242 feeds most of which I hardly ever get to read.

Sorry this is so long, let me just list more software that I currently have installed:

putty, portableapps launcher with a ton of portable tools (WinSCP, FileZilla, VLC, …etc), PsTools, Cygwin, VMware Workstation, iTunes, Firefox (AdBlock, NoScript, CustomizeGoogle, FireGPG, …etc), Metasploit, GPG4Win, IrfanView, Deepburner for burning CDs, dd for creating ISOs, Wireshark, WininstallLE for creating MSI packages, ORCA for creating Transform sets, Nmap, tftpd32.exe for Cisco firmware/config transfers … and the list goes on and on.

Oh yeah, HFS is the f’n shiznit. I just used it the other day to transfer a VM image to a new Linux box.

One more real quick. For “backing up” DVDs I use HD DVD Decrypter 4, FixVTS or VOBBlanker, DVD Shrink, and IMGBurn. I have a batch script that completely automates the entire process (aside from removing the dvd and inserting the blank!). Handbrake is good and I go back and forth between DVD backups and XviD. DVDs are good for standalone players (that don’t play compressed formats) but XviD is good to stream to my XBMC. On Linux I briefly used a tool called ToVid which was incredibly sweet.

LOL. It’s pretty amazing that AIR seems to have such a huge adoption rate in the micro communication community and almost nowhere else.

in response to your AIR comment: the pownce app is also AIR-powered, which goes to show that maybe AIR is meant solely for semi-useless micro-communications web 2.0 apps :)

HFS is pretty sweet. :) I really like it and I think I have the exe on the thumb drive that I always carry with me.

I haven’t used Cerberus or Smartftp – I will check them out, but I don’t really trust ftp these days. It’s not encrypted.

My two cents. Three windows applications that IMAHO are better than linux apps I ever saw (really hoping to be wrong):
HFS: http file server, a single executable of spare KBs, double click and you have a server up and running, very easy to configure but very, very complete. I use webfs under linux, but no match.
CERBERUS: ftp server, incredibly simple and incredibly complete. I often use it as “backdoor” to my windows systems, to get files from remote.
SMARTFTP: the best client ever seen for ftp access. No match with fireftp and filezilla, absolutly. Incredible useful the “global queue”: you set how many connection for every file, how many files at a time, then you connect to how many ftp sites you want (eg. my backdoor :P) and just add files to the queue. The program will let you know (or even turn off the pc) when he’s done.

Now I’ll try foobar, launchy and crossloop :D thank you!

-Jaba

On TextMate, it is good, best text editor I’ve used but Vim is so hard wired into my brain… …while many praise it for writing code I find it much more useful for writing HTML/Latex/Markdown (wiki like syntax). It’s infinitely expandable (though I’ve not dabbled in bundle writing/mods) but I love all the hotkeys that let me highlight some text and immediately (a) format it into html lists/paragraphs, (b) format links, even with nice google/yahoo hotkeys that will perform an internet search and format a link with the proper result, (c) convert to latex/html…

For coding, there’s a lot of pluses. On Windows, one of my interns likes Komodo, it has a lot TextMate-iness to it…

While I like my Macs, not much of an evangelist for Macs I just think they suck less… …if wireless gets up to snuff and some decent fonts are available on Linux (which eventually pan out), I will easily ditch OS X…

Hi Luke,

No offense, but I believe IZarc is a lot better than WinRar. And it is free software under GPL…
Other than that I like your list very much. I also use Scribus for publishing work (as well as OpenOffice for the more basic edition/calc/pres stuff).

And by the way I use Pidgin for IMing as well as IRC…

@naum – heh, everyone seems to love TextMate. :) I never used it, but then again I do not own a mac so perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing. :P

@ths – you are right, the blog doesn’t look at your timezone – it’s set up for my timezone which is US Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5). As far as I know there is no timezone detection in WordPress – you just configure the default local timezone and that’s what it displays. :)

and your blog software doesn’t look at my timezone setting ;). it’s 8:30a, not 2:30a ;)